A 2009 documentary about the man who broadcast his own life on the internet before anyone had a word for it is getting a Brooklyn nightclub screening, with its director and its subject on the panel afterward. nuclear cinema, the independent screening series founded by filmmaker Oluwasegun Oyetunde, will show Ondi Timoner’s “We Live in Public” at Signal, 175 Morgan Ave. in East Williamsburg, on Wednesday, September 23, the series announced in a press release. Doors open at 8 p.m. and the film starts at 9 p.m., according to the event flyer, with the panel following the screening.
The night is the first collaboration between nuclear cinema and Signal, according to the release. The series has run since March 2025 at SAA, the members club in Bushwick, and has hosted more than fifteen screenings that pair lesser-known and world cinema with curated soundtracks, custom visuals and post-screening discussion. Past events have drawn crowds of up to 140 people, the release said.
Oyetunde, who is based in Brooklyn, told Bushwick Daily in an email that the series started at SAA after a connection introduced him to the space and the team there brought him in to program it. The Signal night came together the same way, through a mutual connection who introduced them. Separately, Lucia Santina Ribisi connected him to Timoner and her production company, Interloper, which is how the director came on board. “This is a pilot, but I’m hoping it becomes a regular nuclear cinema night at Signal,” he said.
“We Live in Public” tells the story of Josh Harris, the early internet entrepreneur who founded Pseudo.com, an early live streaming platform, in 1993. Harris spent his fortune on experimental art projects in New York, including Quiet, an underground capsule hotel where more than 100 participants lived entirely on camera, and a project called We Live in Public in which he broadcast his own life and relationship around the clock. Timoner’s film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and follows Harris’s rise and fall alongside his early read on social media, surveillance culture and the loss of privacy.
“Josh Harris foresaw everything that came to pass with social media, the internet, AI, and surveillance culture,” Oyetunde said in the release. “A lot of Gen Z is using crypto, AI, prediction markets, walking past CCTV cameras every day, and they don’t know the voices from the past who saw this coming. I want to expose them to that history.”
The evening opens with a short recorded introduction from Godfrey Reggio, the director of “Koyaanisqatsi” and the rest of the Qatsi trilogy. Oyetunde, who is 27, apprenticed under Reggio and worked as music coordinator on Reggio’s 2023 film “Once Within a Time” from 2021 to 2022, starting when he was 22, he said in the email. Reggio has been making work about surveillance and technology since the 1970s, Oyetunde said, a through line from Reggio’s concerns to the questions “We Live in Public” raises. “Godfrey is one of the last living technological critics from the twentieth century,” Oyetunde said in the release. “Josh Harris picks up right where that critique left off, except he lived inside the thing he was warning about.”
After the film, Oyetunde will moderate a panel with Timoner, Harris, who joins by video call and will take audience questions, KJ Rothweiler of the film podcast The Ion Pack and Katya Austin, a downtown curator and gallerist connected to the crypto and prediction market scene. Timoner also directed “Dig!,” the documentary about the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols, and spent more than a decade filming Harris. The Signal team is handling the space and sound design for the night, including a curated Y2K-era soundtrack that speaks to the film’s late-1990s internet world, Oyetunde said.
Oyetunde describes the series as an incubator rather than a film club. “I want to invite people who work in crypto and prediction markets and put them in a room with artists who aren’t thinking about technology at all,” he said in the release. “A lot of these tech companies lack the foresight to let culture drive anything. Historically, culture has always driven things.”
Earlier nuclear cinema nights included a screening of “24 Hour Party People” in the speakeasy at SAA, staged to recall Manchester’s Hacienda, with a panel featuring the photographer DB Burkman and a vinyl set of Factory Records music, and a five-hour supercut of 1997 cultural ephemera the series called nuclear television, which turned SAA into a nineties MTV experience for 80 people, according to the release.
“It’s not very academic,” Oyetunde said in the release. “I like to educate people about culture through immersion, through party, through discourse. It’s about world building.”
What comes next, Oyetunde said, is more of the same energy in new directions: non-traditional film events, community events and a move into clothing and design. “nuclear cinema is really a broader cultural project, and the screenings are one part of it,” he said.
Tickets for the September 23 screening are $22.85 general admission through Resident Advisor. Capacity is about 75, and the event is 21 and over. The series posts updates at @nuclear.cinema.
Featured image: Troy Anthony Misita / Courtesy nuclear cinema
