A future revolution has already happened. Ten years after a social-democratic war of liberation supposedly won equality, the women of New York are still waiting for it to arrive, so they start organizing another one.

BORN IN FLAMES (1983) imagines that second uprising as fractured and collective at once. Two pirate radio stations, a bicycle-riding women’s army organized by Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield), and a party-line socialist paper edited by characters played by Kathryn Bigelow, Pat Murphy, and Becky Johnston all pursue liberation from different corners of the city, often in conflict with each other.

Lizzie Borden shot it over five years on a shoestring budget, casting nonprofessionals alongside downtown scene figures like Adele Bertei and Honey as the voices of Phoenix Radio and Radio Ragazza. Lawyer and activist Florynce Kennedy appears as Zella Wylie, giving the film a direct link to the real movements it depicts.

The result plays like a document smuggled back from a future that never quite arrived, a science fiction premise used to argue that revolution is unfinished business.