What if acts of liberation were a small breach in the timeline? The kind that allows us to make that dialectical leap Walter Benjamin spoke of, and encounter the past within our present? And what if liberations were always a conquest of the self—when the self, however, is the result of an active relationship with other bodies, human, animal, and vegetal? What if liberations included those from Nazi-Fascist or imperialist occupations, but also from authoritarian regimes, patriarchal and colonial cages, and from economic and social injustices?

What if liberation also meant freeing cinema from the often stifling mechanisms of the industry? And what if we could then celebrate a poorer but freer cinema, as taught to us by Maya Deren, Jonas Mekas, or Roberto Rossellini who, eighty years ago, created the film that became the emblem of all liberations, Roma, città aperta, shooting in the rubble-strewn streets of a shattered city, even using expired film stock?  “Spring will come. And it will be more beautiful than the others. Because we will be free.”