The world is changing at the speed of light. Decades are unfolding in a matter of weeks. And with mainstream politics unable to keep up with the public, we crave stories to make sense of our upside-down times.
Pop Front Pictures is dedicated to uncovering the gripping narratives rising out of our era of global turbulence. But just as new monsters crop up through the corrosions of our democracy, so too does a new generation of heroes ready to fight back for justice. These are the true stories Pop Front Pictures will tell.
Pop Front = Popular Front *
*According to Encyclopedia Britannica: Popular front is any coalition of working-class and middle-class parties united for the defense of democratic forms against a Fascist assault.
The Team
Nando Vila is a host, producer, and writer focusing on politics, sports, and culture.
He executive produced, created, and hosted the political sketch comedy show Happy Ending for Fusion and hosted the popular Gimlet Media podcast We Came to Win. Before that he created and hosted Midterm Mayhem: The Ultimate Political Smackdown alongside Kal Penn, and was the creator and host of The Soccer Gods on Fusion.
Nando was the executive producer of the Emmy-nominated documentary The Naked Truth: Trumpland, which profiled the people who fueled the Trump candidacy. Nando was also Vice President of Programming at Fusion TV, helping Disney & Univision build its way into the US Hispanic market. In 2014, Nando was honored by Forbes magazine in their “30 under 30” feature.
He was born and raised in Miami, Florida and lives in Los Angeles.
Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin, a magazine that he started from his dorm room at George Washington University ten years ago and that today reaches 62,000 subscribers in print and over 2 million unique visitors online per month. Jacobin today has offices in a half dozen countries internationally and foreign-language franchises in Argentina, Brazil, Germany, and Italy.
Sunkara is also a columnist at the UK-based newspaper The Guardian and a frequent contributor to Vox, The New York Times, and The Nation. He has previously written for The Washington Post, Vice, and Salon and is the author of the 2019 book The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality.
In addition to Jacobin, Sunkara is the founding publisher of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, an scholarly journal featuring leading sociologists and historians, and the publisher of Tribune, a political publication that George Orwell helped found in 1937.
Sunkara lives in New York, where he is from.
C.C. Kilpatrick is a writer and editor at Jacobin magazine. He has previously written for New York magazine, Vice, Tribune, and AlterNet. His fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s and Post Road. His short story “Yuri” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Joyce Carol Oates.
His first novel, Motherland, is forthcoming from Zero Books. Originally from Texas, he lives in New York with his wife and two children.
“Joel David Moore and Rishi Bajaj’s Balcony 9 is teaming with Pop Front Pictures for Stefan vs. ISIS, a feature film that has script from C.C. Kilpatrick and Zack Stentz.
The companies secured life rights to the story of Stefan Bertram-Lee, a British-born non-binary millennial who, tired of a life that is only lived online, flew to Syria and joined a group of Kurdish freedom fighters. Their story was recounted in “The Online Left Goes To War,” a 2019 Jacobin article penned by Kilpatrick, which documented Bertram-Lee’s struggle to adapt to surviving in the conflict-ravaged region before eventually finding a way to make an impact in the fight against ISIS.” (read more on Deadline)
