Un cirque à New York

With her full beard, Jennifer Miller is a most unusual character. For the past five summers, she has been travelling all over New York City's most remote boroughs with Circus Amok, offering free outdoors shows. With those shows – an explosive mix of classical circus acts, queer aesthetics and bitter social commentary –, Miller, a well-known figure of the downtown cultural avant-garde, goes for working-class audiences and finds them. The 1999 Tour, followed day after day in this documentary, is met with special enthusiasm by the people. After the killing of Amadou Diallo, a young Guinean immigrant shot 41 times by the police in February 99, social unrest and movements opposing Mayor Giuliani's policy have been developing. In this struggle, involving an elitist, security-oriented vision of the city on the one hand, and increasingly disenfranchised citizens on the other, Jennifer Miller and Circus Amok reclaim the public space with humour and reinvent a new form of activism, bold yet playful. Thus becoming the true defenders of democracy. The film depicts this unusual troop, focusing on the exceptional woman who created it and still makes it happen. While following the colourful daily life of the tour, the film becomes in turn a poetico-political travelogue in the streets of New York City, disclosing a new image of its urban reality, very far from clichés or triumphant economic figures. Where one will realize that the real freaks are not those most expected to be