Library Transmission: Suburban Fury

This special screening, marking the UK premiere of Suburban Fury, will be introduced by screenwriter, theorist and essayist Charles Mudede. A conversation between Charles and The Otolith Collective will follow.  

Suburban Fury is a compelling and confounding documentary that feels as urgent and as unsettling today as the events it portrays. 

Suburban Fury centres on Sara Jane Moore, a white American accountant, activistand FBI informant living in suburban San Francisco, who attempted, at the age of 45, to assassinate Gerald Ford, the 38th President of the United States, on September 22 1975.  

It unfolds as a first-person monologue filmed in the sites of the Bay Area in which Sara Jane Moore comes to believe that her destiny lies in shooting Gerald Ford, the Republican politician that assumed the Presidency after the resignation of Richard Nixon in August 1974.  

Devoir and Mudede treat this forgotten episode as an unsettling portrait into the theory, practice and promise of political assassination. Combining rare archival footage with stylised scenes of the imagined exchanges between Moore and her FBI contact, Suburban Fury traces the transformation of Moore from volunteer at the Hearst Corporation’s People in Need food distribution centres to the second woman to attempt an assassination in the United States.  

Devoir and Mudede situate Moore’s will to change history within the exigencies and vicissitudes of the militant political movements of the 1970s from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to the Women’s Liberation Movement to the Symbionese Liberation Army.   

Influenced by James Benning and Emile de Antonio, Suburban Fury experiments with interview settings by portraying Moore behind glass, seated in the back seat of a car as the voiceover moves in adjacency to the image.  

50 years on, the story of Sara Jane Moore resonates with the political feelings of rage, righteousness, agency and immediacy of the 2020s.  

Devoir and Mudede’s film neither explains nor condemns. Rather it immerses us in the chain of reasoning by which Sara Jane Moore arrives at her fateful decision to act on her beliefs.  

Suburban Fury stands as a politically resonant work of art; it is already a landmark in contemporary independent American cinema. 

Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Doors open at 1.30pm; event starts at 2pm and finishes at 5pm.

Runtime: 120 minutes.  

Directed by Robinson Devor and written by Charles Mudede.