Eat the Moon Films

George Monbiot deconstructs the roots, secretive propagation and deep impact of a doctrine that has played a profound role in transforming our economics, politics, environment, and how we've come to view ourselves.

For years, right-wing politicians and pundits have repeatedly criticized the left for playing “the race card” and “the woman card.” This new film turns the tables and takes dead aim at the right’s own longstanding – but rarely discussed – deployment of white-male identity politics in American presidential elections. Ranging from Richard Nixon’s tough-talking, law-and-order campaign in 1968 to Donald Trump’s hyper-macho revival of the same fear-based appeals in 2020, "The Man Card" shows how the right has mobilized dominant ideas about manhood and enacted a deliberate strategy to frame Democrats and liberals as soft, brand the Republican Party as the party of “real men,” and position conservatives as defenders of white male power and authority in the face of transformative demographic change and ongoing struggles for racial, gender, and sexual equality.

Two hundred years ago immigrant farmers in the Catskills, fed up with oppression and exploitation by absentee landlords, staged a rebellion known as the Anti-Rent War. The uprising changed the course of history, paving the way to land rights across America and to the formation of a new political group—Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party. Today, although largely forgotten, the historic uprising lives on through direct descendants of those rebellious farmers. Calico Rebellion explores a pivotal moment in American history, and a community’s unique and enduring connection to the past through the songs, stories, and costumes preserved from the 1840s. Part historical “true crime” story and part meditation on land and belonging in America, Calico Rebellion is a deep dive into small town America, its identity, idealism and the violence that percolates beneath the surface.