“CALICO REBELLION” FILM SCREENING AT SUNY ONEONTA

ONEONTA, N.Y. -- As part of the Fall 2025 Red Dragon Reading Series at the SUNY College at Oneonta, the documentary film, “Calico Rebellion: The Anti-Rent War and the Second American Revolution,” produced by Oneonta local author and filmmaker Peter Hutchinson. The film will be shown on Tuesday, October 14, 2025, at 7:00 pm in HIRC Lecture Hall 4 on the SUNY Oneonta campus. The screening will be followed by a talk by the film’s director, Victoria Kupchinesky, and a reception. Admission to the event is free, and members of the community are invited to attend.
Victoria Kupchinetsky is an award-winning TV journalist and filmmaker. Her documentary, “The Lakota Daughters,” about women and girls on Pine Ridge Native American Reservation in SD, won the national 2021 Gracie Award for “outstanding storytelling technics,” and the Audience Choice Best Documentary Short Award at the 2021 Kansas City International Film Festival. She has produced and directed documentaries about the first US climate refugees in Louisiana, Guantanamo prison, and Mormon feminists in Utah’s polygamist communities.
“Calico Rebellion” presents the events of the Anti-Rent War, a farmers’ uprising in upstate New York two hundred years ago that changed the course of American history and paved the way to the formation of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party. Today,
although largely forgotten, the costumed rebellion lives on through direct descendants of those farmers, through their stories, songs, and the eerie costumes preserved since the 1840s. Through a rich blend of oral history, verité, and magical realism-infused animation, “Calico Rebellion” explores themes of land, belonging, and the intricate fabric of American identity. It is a cinematic journey into small town America, its idealism and the violence that percolates just beneath the surface. The film explores themes of land, belonging, and the historical identity of the people who continue to change the political landscape of their country.
Following the “Calico Rebellion” screening, the Spring 2025 Red Dragon Reading Series at SUNY Oneonta will conclude with a reading by poet Bertha Rogers and novels Libby Cudmore on Tuesday, November 11.
The “Calico Rebellion” screening at SUNY Oneonta is sponsored by the SUNY Oneonta Department of English and supported by a grant from SUNY Oneonta Committee on Public Events.
More information about the Red Dragon Reading Series is available from Dr. Roger Hecht of the SUNY Oneonta Department of English at (607) 436-3033.