Featuring: Carla Henry, Chanelle Baugh, Nadia Everett, Sharon Henry,

Rosemaria Flynnie, Judy Vickers, Jule Boyle, Bethany Goulding, Salah
Ayub, Mark O’Pray, Melissa Booth, Roy Booth, Vickie Cooper, David Whyte,
Reiner Rhefus
Live music recording: Mica Levi and Demdike Stare / ‘Communism’s Coming Home’ Written and Performed by Gruff Rhys
Voice of Engels: Maxine Peake
Voice of October Revolution: Tim Etchells 
Camera: Neus Ollé-Soronellas, et al.
Editors: David Charap, Andreas Dalström
Sound mix: Jochen Jezussek
Producers: Siniša Mitrović, Natasha Dack Ojumu
Executive Producer: Sarah Perks
Produced by Shady Lane Productions, Tigerlilly Films, HOME Manchester and Manchester International Festival

Friedrich Engels, co-founder of communist theory with his friend Karl Marx, lived for twenty years in Manchester, the world’s first industrial city. A hundred years after the October Revolution of 1917, which was inspired by their ideas, a decommissioned statue of Engels is retrieved from a village in Eastern Ukraine, travels across Europe, and arrives to Manchester where it is inaugurated by a crowd of thousands. The film follows its journey and, in parallel, looks at social conditions in 21st-century austerity Britain. A visually layered mosaic of genres – including road movie, experimental television broadcast and socialist-activist mass event – Ceremony reasserts the idea of communism as a visionary alternative to the tyranny of capital that governs political, economic and emotional lives.

• Programm Programme: Socialism or Barbarism