For years, Long Beach has quietly built one of Southern California’s most compelling design conversations—not through singular spectacle, but through layered civic evolution: a growing Downtown Design District that has matured from concept into identity, hosting regional events centered around the importance of design, and an Art + Design Walk that, in its revived form, has become one of the city’s strongest demonstrations of creative momentum.
Now, that conversation is moving to the screen.
From April 23 through April 30, City Fabrick, in partnership with Art Theatre of Long Beach, will launch the first-ever Designing Resistance Film Week. This citywide cultural offering treats design not just as decoration but also as a political and civic tool—something capable of confronting power, documenting dissent, and imagining alternatives.
Designing Resistance Film Week works within the growing Long Beach use of design as language.
That framing matters in Long Beach precisely because design here has increasingly stopped being niche language and started becoming civic vocabulary.
Even outside the aforementioned checkmarks like our Design District, the city’s architecture conversation has similarly expanded: Adaptive reuse. Preservation debates. Public-space interventions. Or the kinds of design questions raised by groups like City Fabrick itself, which has long argued that urban form is inseparable from equity.
“Design has always played a role in shaping power, but it also holds the potential to challenge it,” said Baktaash Sorkhabi, communications director at City Fabrick. “This film week is about making that visible and creating space for people to reflect on how creativity can be a force for change.”
And that, perhaps, is why this festival lands at the right moment: Long Beach is no longer merely consuming design—it is increasingly using it to define itself.
Designing Resistance Film Week 2026: The films exploring architecture, protest, collapse, performance, and dissent.
The lineup itself moves fluidly across eras and disciplines, revealing how resistance is often embedded in aesthetics long before it becomes policy.
- Architecton — A meditation on architecture, ruins, and material, examining how built environments carry both memory and ideology.
- The Architecture of Doom — A chilling study of how fascist aesthetics and monumental design became central to Nazi ideology.
- The Art of Protest — A look at protest graphics, political imagery, and the visual language movements use to mobilize.
- California Scenario — A new first-run title tracing California through design, politics, and cultural contradiction, arriving fresh from festival circulation.
- I Am Sun Mu — The story of North Korean defector-artist Sun Mu, whose propaganda-style work critiques authoritarian power.
- Metropolis — Silent cinema’s foundational urban dystopia, still one of the sharpest visual warnings about class and mechanized power.
- Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry — A portrait of how artistic practice becomes political confrontation through one of contemporary art’s most recognizable dissident figures.
- Paris Is Burning — The legendary portrait of queer ballroom culture, chosen here as both social history and design of identity itself.
- Power Station — A work centered on labor, space, and industrial systems.
- PROTEST/ARCHITECTURE — An exploration of how architecture itself can resist state narratives.
- Desolation Center — The story of radical desert performances that prefigured underground festival culture.
- The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing — A poetic meditation on memory, displacement, and observation.
- Through the Repellent Fence — A borderland intervention where art physically crosses geopolitical boundaries.
Designing Resistance Film Week 2026: Happenings beyond the films themselves
Rather than functioning as just a traditional film festival, Designing Resistance is built as a weeklong civic-cultural series, pairing screenings with panels, performances, workshops, and conversations that deliberately move discussion beyond the theater itself.
Students will receive half-off admission using the code STUDENTRESISTANCE, with valid student identification required at entry, signaling an intentional push to make younger audiences part of the conversation.
One of the festival’s early social anchors will be the opening mixer at Art Du Vin’s parklet outside the Art Theatre on Friday, April 24, from 4PM to 6PM—a pre-screening gathering that physically extends the festival into the street, reinforcing how public space itself remains central to the week’s themes.
That same evening, The Art of Protest screening will be followed by a panel featuring Los Angeles graphic artist Never Made and Josh Garcia of Intertrend, expanding the discussion into contemporary graphic language and activist visual culture.
Later that night, Paris Is Burning receives perhaps the week’s most kinetic framing: a drag performance by Kiki before the screening, followed by an afterparty at The Executive Suite—a reminder that queer performance, identity, and nightlife remain inseparable from the film’s enduring cultural impact.
Other screenings lean heavily into direct engagement: Desolation Center includes a Q+A with director Stuart Swezey; California Scenario—a newly circulating first-run title fresh off the festival circuit—brings both writer and director into conversation; Metropolis will be presented with a live score by Cliff Retallick using piano, organ, and theremin, restoring silent cinema to something physically felt.
And one of the week’s most politically charged evenings may arrive with I Am Sun Mu, where Liberty in North Korea is expected to host a post-screening panel—with possible participation from Sun Mu himself, the North Korean defector-artist whose story became foundational to the organization’s own trajectory.
Why this festival matters now
What makes Designing Resistance especially significant is that it arrives when Long Beach itself is increasingly asking what culture should do—not merely what it should look like.
The city has spent years strengthening its food identity, its music ambitions, and its public art visibility. But design—particularly design tied to civic meaning—has often operated more quietly beneath those conversations.
This festival makes that invisible infrastructure visible. It says architecture is not neutral. Posters are not neutral. Public space is not neutral. Even a film screening can become a civic argument.
And in a city where creative identity increasingly defines how neighborhoods understand themselves, that may be one of the most important conversations Long Beach can host right now.
For more information on Designing Resistance Film Week, click here.
