Ken & Flo Jacobs: The Sky Socialist

An evening celebrating the work and lives of one of the American avant-garde’s most prolific couples, Ken and Flo Jacobs, who both passed away in 2025. We screen The Sky Socialist, a film they returned to throughout their lives, taking on different forms and feeding into further works until its eventual completion in 2019.

• Introduced and presented by William Rose (UK), editor of Ken Jacobs: I Walked Into My Shortcomings (The Visible Press), the new monumental compendium that will be available on the night. 

One of Ken & Flo Jacobs’s most personal and signature works, The Sky Socialist is many things: an allegorical meditation on the post-Holocaust world, starring Flo Jacobs as ​“Anne Frank”; a handcrafted document of pre-gentrification lower Manhattan, at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge; a monument to the force and immediacy of small-gauge filmmaking; and a mutable text to which Jacobs would return time and again throughout his career, reworking, revising, and reimagining its elements across various projects. Shot on Ken and Flo’s rooftop and the streets around it, The Sky Socialist dazzlingly melds diaristic documentary with epic allegory, and the transfixing result is nothing less than one of the most essential American avant-garde films of the 1960s.⁠ (Azazel Jacobs)

“Flo and I lived alongside the Manhattan side of The Brooklyn Bridge, poor as mice but filming on 8mm Kodachrome was absurdly cheap. We loved each other and loved where we were, a blessedly neglected piece of 19^th century Manhattan. Moving towards marriage and children in a threatening world, more so as Jews, prompted this airy sunlit fable… Very dear to us, The Sky Socialist even tells a story, the only one I ever had to tell.” (Ken Jacobs)

With thanks to Azazel Jacobs

• On the occasion of this screening, yanco is offering Spaghetti Aza (1976) free to watch until May 31, along with a text by Edwin Carels. This endearing one-minute film diary shows Ken and Flo’s son, Azazel, asleep at the table before being put to bed, making it, indirectly, also a portrait of two doting parents.