We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher is a 65-minute cinematic experiment exploring the continuing relevance of the late theorist’s ideas on capitalism, culture, and the future.

Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter, working as Close and Remote, developed the film between 2024-2025. Through instagram (@markfisherfilm), they enlisted the support of 70 collaborators. The film was made with no budget, no studio backing and no institutional permissions.

The film explores solidarity, shared labour and digital connectivity. It enacts what Fisher insisted was still possible – decapitalised cultural production, collective agency among the ruins of neoliberal atomisation. A reminder that DIY doesn’t mean private – it means working together.

In the film nine chapters drift across hauntological terrain – from Felixstowe’s windblown beaches to the CCRU’s delirial hyperstition lab; from K-punk’s midnight blog posts to the echoing chambers of The Vampire Castle; from viral slogans (‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world’) to streets filled with protest and grief. The film deliberately projects beyond 2017 into the Perma-Crisis of 2025/26.

It navigates what Fisher said alongside contemporaneous footage shot by Close and Remote in London. Brexit. Thatcher’s death. The Dump Trump rally. Starmer’s ‘Island of Strangers’ – the phrase itself sounding like something K-punk might have quickly drawn into a post on how Labour abandoned the Left.

The film is not nostalgia. Fisher warned against that. It is an evocation of failed promised futures.  And in doing so, it becomes a kind of working group for collective dreaming – a counter to the doom scroll machine of capitalist realism. All about the people who connected in some way.

Where others accelerated towards Mars and living forever (Musk et al), Fisher re-routed the signal through public pedagogy in K-punk and music, transforming these things into a readymade audience. His gift was in making complexity speak in plain language, not in simplifying it but in dignifying the reader – you can understand this. You’re not alone. The one person NME.

Capitalist Realism now reads as a user’s manual for the political psychosis of post-Brexit Britain – precarity normalised, education hollowed out, a tech elite mimicking myth (Palantir). Yet in 2026, something stirs, a moment for action and solidarity. Not Saturday protest and work on Monday but the idea of a recombined force against Trash Populism. People are up for it. Refusing the misery feed and returning to action. Turning toward each other, asking new (old) questions.

Header image by Joe Magee