How to think about the ways cinema can put into action the relation between the certainties of injustice, the uncertainties of justice and the calculation of justness? This question has been stirring Jacques Rancière ever since he was taken in by the wave of cinephilia that churned through Paris in the 1960’s. From his first interview in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1976, via his own series of writings for the same magazine between 1998 and 2001, to the publication of La Fable cinématographique (2001) and Les écarts du cinéma (2011), cinema has been an important strain throughout his work, linking his dwellings on the shores of politics with his ventures into the realms of aesthetics. How can cinema be thought of as an overpass between these two ever shifting landscapes, as a terrain of struggle that bears the original responsibility of politics: the organization of dissent? If it’s true that we can no longer believe in the dreams of cinema as the privileged form of the identification of art and life, or as an enigmatic force that can give us new vision and awaken us to a new consciousness, how can cinema still make a difference? According to Rancière, we need to let go of those persistent expectations that consider cinema as a instrument to inform political strategies and mobilize militant energies. Instead, it has to be regarded as nothing but a surface where experiences can be organized in new figures and relegated into new trajectories, as a “distribution of the sensible” that can evoke a process of transformation, disrupting the dominant logic of representation and changing the coordinates of the given. Any political “efficiency” of cinema cannot be based on a link between cause and effect, or a bond between revelation and mobilization – on the contrary, it has to content itself with a loss of destination, inviting us to reframe the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible. The question that remains is then not what cinema can do for us, but what we can do with cinema… In this DISSENT! session we will take a selection of recent films as starting point for a discussion on how cinema and its culture can contribute to a reinvention of politics.