Livia K. Stone's book is a theoretically rigorous and politically useful text that explores activist filmmaking in Atenco, Mexico, and how it intervenes in longstanding legacies of police brutality and development initiatives. Stone asks, “What do [activist films] do? Do they work in the ways that filmmakers think that they do? How do we know if they do?” (113). Stone ultimately answers her own questions by arguing that the filmmakers are “literally producing a medium of human interactions … that helps produce a culture outside of neoliberal economies and neoliberal morality” (150).

Stone is invested in understanding “how people use media in their daily lives to create, maintain, and transform relationships with other real people” (4). She builds a transnational element into her exploration by linking the politics of camera surveillance in Atenco with the Black Lives Matter and Occupy movements in the United States. She understands film to be a neutral tool that can work for and against both the neoliberal state and anti-neoliberal activist efforts. She roots her theoretical interventions in tangible scenarios that enable her to unpack how film can be used to build new networks and alternative economies of exchange that augment the dehumanizing and individualizing effects of capitalism, without knowing the when or the how. Although some readers might find this “activism without guarantees” bleak, Stone convincingly argues that the unpredictability of the form might work in activists’ favor, and asks the reader to focus with a broader lens on what political “success” might look like.

Stone explores these “transformative economies of film” (164) through different points of entry. She begins with documenting the multilayered historical and political landscape of Atenco, providing the uninformed reader with an in-depth understanding of the contested social landscape in which the book is steeped. From there, she explores the film activism of three Atenco filmmakers while unpacking each activist's representational methods and means, and she explains how they interface with their disparate social positionalities and politics. This leads into an examination of the ethics of compañerismo, a collective, horizontal, alliance-based approach to community organizing that critiques the protagonismo—an attitude of rigid individualism and self-serving actions—that neoliberal capitalist practices propagate. Veering away from romanticizing activist politics, Stone unpacks the complex meaning of this term and the ways in which activists weaponize it to police each other's commitments and methods. The book closes with a vital discussion on the dynamic processes of exchange surrounding the films, particularly disparate modes of distribution, and how such processes are just as important, if not more so, than the films themselves.

As a white Northern academic, Stone importantly does not shy away from the contradictions of how her social identity interfaces with the investments and identities of her interviewees. By indentifying the complexities of her positionality and how it informs her ethnographic inquiries and exchanges, she is able to navigate and take accountability for such inherent power imbalances, rather than sidestep them. The strengths of this book are found in how Stone avoids overly simplistic interpretations of cultural knowledge production and in her staying curious and open to the myriad of ways a single film can have meaning.

Given Stone's adeptness at addressing complex processes of exchange and tension-ridden power relations, the book would be strengthened by a more extended and in-depth discussion of the politics, complications, and opportunities surrounding the distribution and reception of activist films, allowing her to build on one of the book's strongest and most compelling contributions. Ultimately, Stone's book critically engages with the compañerismo ethics of activist filmmakers in Atenco, which strive to model “living in a shared way” (94), where the shared enemy is the neoliberal state and the antidote is the strategic, intentional cultivation of new relationships rooted in horizontal interdependence, reciprocity, and economies of exchange that rewrite the inherently dehumanizing effects of capitalism by allowing opportunities for “inward collective transformation” (142).