11/17/2025
Thursday, November 20, 2025 documentary "Occupy Wall Street: An American Dream" Free Film Screening & Discussion
Featuring members of Occupy Youngstown
Doors 6:30, Film 7pm
Calvin Center for the Arts
755 Mahoning Ave, Youngstown OH 44502
Brought to you by Youngstown Solidarity Network,
Calvin Center for the Arts
and the Sixth Annual Youngstown May Day Fest 2026
https://www.youngstownmaydayfestival.com/
More info: https://www.facebook.com/share/1DSFsEwaTK/
Occupy Wall Street: An American Dream (51 min) is electrifying, intimate, and steeped in the grit and hope of a nation in crisis, the documentary traces how a small encampment in a New York City park ignited one of the great democratic uprisings in modern U.S. history. As Wall Street gangsters crashed the global economy and were rewarded with bailouts while millions were tossed into unemployment, eviction, and despair, everyday people responded by doing the unthinkable: they stood up.
Told through a deeply personal narrative and filmed across 42 occupations in 27 states, the documentary captures the movement’s wildfire spread and the surprising coalition that powered it—laid-off factory workers in the Rust Belt, Indigenous activists resisting another kind of occupation in the Southwest, debt-burdened graduates with no jobs, and homeless veterans of America’s forever wars. Through humor, heart, and unflinching honesty, the film shows how these unlikely allies forged a new kind of American Dream in public plazas, parks, and street corners from coast to coast.
As occupiers flipped the political script—from austerity to inequality, reform to revolution, and fear to power—they revived working-class politics and put oligarchs on their back foot, revealing the economic, social, and democratic possibilities that erupt when ordinary people refuse to accept the status quo.
Looking back on that turbulent first year, the film situates Occupy in a longer history of popular uprisings—what scholar Frances Fox Piven called “movements that have episodically changed history”—and offers a vivid reminder to the next generation that a better world is possible, because once, millions rose up together to fight for it.
cc: Occupy Wall Street Occupy wall street Occupy Wall Street
