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CineMarch Media
"Revolutionary Ideas in Motion"
Books
by Edward Michael Francis
Memoir and nonfiction on cults, control, and survival.
“I didn’t escape one cult,
I escaped many.”
These books trace the long arc of life inside high-control systems—beginning in a family cult, reappearing through years of cult hopping, and resurfacing again inside the hyper-disciplined world of the marching arts.
The settings change—family, performance, business—but the control logic stays the same. What starts as obedience becomes identity. What looks like dedication becomes surveillance. What’s called love, excellence, or professionalism quietly turns into compliance.
These books are not written from the outside looking in. They are written from survival, pattern recognition, and the slow reconstruction of self after control.
If you’ve ever felt like power keeps changing its costume but never its tactics, this work is for you.
Projects
Three books. One through-line: power in disguise.
7 Rooms: One Family Inside a Cult
7 Rooms: One Family Inside a Cult is a memoir about growing up inside a system that taught obedience as love and control as care.
Told from the inside, the book traces life in a family structured around secrecy, hierarchy, and moral certainty—where questioning was treated as betrayal, and survival meant learning the rules faster than anyone else.
This is not a story about monsters in robes or distant compounds. It is about how cult dynamics take root in ordinary homes, how power hides behind tradition and loyalty, and how children are trained to normalize what should never be normal.
7 Rooms is for readers who have ever looked back at their upbringing and wondered why love felt conditional—and why leaving felt like treason.
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Proposed Cover
7 Houses: Memoir of a Cult Hopper
7 Houses: Memoir of a Cult Hopper examines what happens when high-control systems repeat across a life—not as isolated incidents, but as variations on the same structure.
Moving through families, communities, belief systems, and social worlds, the book traces how cult dynamics reassert themselves in different forms, each time presenting as something new while operating by familiar rules. Charisma replaces doctrine. Loyalty replaces belief. Compliance is reframed as growth.
Rather than offering a single origin or endpoint, 7 Houses focuses on recognition: how patterns of control persist, how they adapt to different environments, and how difficult it can be to name what’s happening while you’re still inside it. This is a memoir about continuity, not closure—and about learning to see systems clearly enough to understand how they work.
Confessions of an Ex-Bando: Life Inside a Performance Cult
Confessions of an Ex-Bando: Life Inside a Performance Cult is an insider account of the marching arts world, written from long-term participation rather than retrospective distance.
Drawing on years spent as a performer, designer, and judge, the book examines how cultures built around discipline, precision, and excellence can quietly normalize control. Surveillance becomes structure. Exhaustion becomes virtue. Silence becomes professionalism.
This is not an exposé written from outside the activity, nor a rejection of artistry or craft. It is a record of how high-performance environments train people to accept conditions they would question elsewhere—and how those systems maintain themselves through language, tradition, and collective belief.
About the Author
Edward Michael Francis (they/them) is a writer, critic, and cultural analyst whose work focuses on high-control systems, coercive power, and the subtle ways domination disguises itself as love, excellence, or belonging.
Edward’s life did not include a single cult experience, but a pattern of them. What began inside a family-based cult repeated across multiple environments over time — performance hierarchies, and professional worlds structured around obedience, surveillance, and moralized control. For years, these systems appeared unrelated. Only later did their shared logic become clear.
Their writing emerges from lived experience, not theory. These books were written after survival — during the long, deliberate process of recognizing patterns, reclaiming autonomy, and rebuilding a self that had been shaped by compliance rather than choice. Edward writes for readers who have sensed that something was wrong long before they had language for it.
Across 7 Rooms, 7 Houses, and Confessions of an Ex-Bando, Edward documents how control systems migrate, adapt, and persist — and how people can learn to see them clearly enough to leave. The work is personal, but its purpose is collective: to name what often goes unnamed, and to offer recognition to readers who may still be inside structures they haven’t yet been able to identify.
Edward is the creator of several podcasts including Marxists at the Movies, The Marching Revolution, and CultFroggy, and produces independent cultural criticism through CineMarch Media LLC.
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