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 Documentaries: Ready, Set ... Action |
Documentaries have been
gaining steam over the last few years. Filmmakers are working with
activists, advocates, and organizers to give new and exciting meaning
to the term cinema verité.
A week before the 2006 mid-term elections, I found myself in a room
full of strangers, packed like sardines in a neighbor's home a few
blocks from my own. At the outset I knew nobody there except my
roommate, but by the end of the night we were all exchanging
information, ideas, and telephone numbers. The house party had been
organized online; the only price of admission was a voluntary
contribution of a snack or a handful of Halloween candy. At night's
close our energy was high and our anger was focused, in part fueled by
the documentary film we had come together to watch, American Blackout (2006).
Winner
of a Special Jury Prize at Sundance, the film exhaustively explores the
voter suppression techniques employed in Florida (2000) and Ohio
(2004), almost exclusively to the detriment of African-Americans, and
to the benefit of the Republican Party and the president. After the
screening that night, some of us spent a few hours making phone calls
to voters in Virginia, Ohio, and California, sharing our frustration
with the follies of the Republican do-nothing Congress, and urging a
change come Election Day. As subsequent events would bear out, we were
hardly the only ones rallying for change. We also weren't the only ones
moved by the power of documentary film to humanize complex issues,
explore stories brushed aside or underreported in our sound-bite laden
mass media, or compel people to action.
Many indicators suggest
that the power of documentaries has been increasing over the last few
years. The growing clout and commercial success of hard-hitting
politically-charged documentaries (Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, Eugene Jarecki's Why We Fight, and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth) and politicized feature films (Stephen Soderbergh's Traffic, George Clooney's Goodnight and Good Luck, and Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now)
speaks to a growing audience for film that gives people real
information and historical analysis about the world we live in. The
exploding number of young filmmakers, videographers, and video
activists speaks to this as well.
As the digital video
revolution has exponentially expanded access to cameras and editing
software, new forms of distribution have followed apace. As a result,
films that don't break into the theaters or get airtime on TV are
increasingly reaching audiences thanks to festivals, netflix.com,
youtube.com, and independent distribution and screening networks. But
what is perhaps most interesting about the moment are the mutually
beneficial ways that filmmakers are working with activists, advocates,
and organizers to give new and exciting meaning to the term cinema verité.
“Docs are seen or not seen because of the
grassroots,” says Ian Inaba, director of American Blackout, and co-founder of Guerilla News Network (www.gnn.tv). “If you don't go to where people are already interested and engaged, you're fighting an uphill battle.”
When
his film was released, Inaba approached all of the usual
suspects—festivals, distributors, and television networks—but he also
approached groups on the ground doing the most tangible civil rights
work on these issues.
“We made the film available to ACORN, the
Rainbow-Push Coalition, the Urban League. We also really tried to reach
young people in the black community,” says Inaba. As a result, the film
was widely discussed on black radio, and TV One, the black cable
network, bought the film for a national television premiere.
Two months before the midterms, Inaba also launched Video the Vote (www.videothevote.org),
which turned out over 1,400 video activists to polling places across
the country on November 7th. Many signed up after seeing the film,
spurred to put their cameras to use documenting evidence of
irregularities or outright fraud. Although most progressives were happy
with the outcome of the elections, Inaba points out that some of the
volunteer footage documented serious flaws with electronic voting
machines across the country, poorly trained poll workers, and confusing
photo ID laws. Inaba and others are still working to distribute the
footage to members of the media to keep the issue of the problems in
the U.S. electoral system alive.
“It turns out that simply asking
people to go out and spend a few hours filming an election is something
that a lot of people are willing to do,” Inaba explained. “What I
realized through this process is that to get people motivated to
action, you need to be direct.”
This realization is one that many
filmmakers and activists are starting to take more seriously. While
some documentary filmmakers set out to tell a story for the story's
sake, many are passionate about an issue and want to see their films
spur direct action or social change. In the same spirit, many
activists, NGOs, and social movement organizations are learning how to
better harness the cachet of film, and doing so in increasingly
sophisticated ways.
A good example of this
emerging strategic relationship between film and policy was the
November 2005 release, simultaneously in theaters and on DVD, of Robert
Greenwald's Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price.
It was timed to coincide with a national week of action organized by
Wal-Mart Watch, a coalition of over 200 labor, community, and
environmental organizations working to publicize the more heinous
aspects of the company's track record, and to demand reforms in the way
the company treats its employees in the US and around the world. The
film was widely reviewed in the mainstream media, aided immensely by
the fact that the Wal-Mart Corporation publicly attacked it sight
unseen on the eve of its release.
But the real secret to its
success lay in its ability to connect to campaigns already on the
ground. During the national week of action, it was shown on over 4,000
screens big and small across the country. “The coalition grew as the
film grew, so while doing research for the film I was able to use those
union and community organization contacts to find the people who we
actually ended up interviewing,” says Luisa Dantas, co-producer of
Wal-Mart. I reached Dantas in New Orleans where she is working on a
feature-length documentary on the reconstruction work being done by
local chapters of ACORN and Common Cause, organizations she established
relationships with during her work on Wal-Mart. “Getting it out to town
halls, churches, and house parties is the key. With Wal-Mart this was
also important for getting it out to an audience that doesn't
necessarily already agree with you. An art house release in New York,
Los Angeles, and San Francisco is not going to do that.”
Interestingly enough, this relationship to the grassroots also makes a lot of sense on economic grounds. Brave New Theaters (www.bravenewtheaters.com),
a new offshoot of this movement, is a creative online platform that
cuts out theater chains and turns the living rooms of activists into
movie houses.
“The dirty little secret about moviemaking is that
there is no way to make money showing films theatrically, especially
documentaries,” says Jim Gilliam, who developed the platform. “DVD
sales are where films make money.”
Robert Greenwald's Iraq for Sale
is being distributed by Brave New Films largely through house parties
and community screenings; since its release in October, there have been
5,000 worldwide.
Brave New Films offers the DVD for sale in bulk along with kits and guidance for holding screenings.
www.iraqforsale.orgThe site hosts a searchable database of
screenings all over the country in homes, community centers, coffee
houses, and churches. Besides selling DVDs, it also provides
downloadable fliers, posters, and other materials, making it easy to
organize and advertise community screenings. This alternative to the
large corporate distributors also allows filmmakers to build a
constituency by identifying where their audience is. The platform gives
them the option of communicating with the people who are watching their
films, soliciting feedback, or spreading the word about a new film.
“Film
is a new frontier. If you can tap into that emotional and narrative
context, there is a lot of energy there,” says Laura Dawn, Cultural
Director for MoveOn.org, the progressive
organization of 3.3 million that grew out of an online petition in
1996. Dawn points to the many ways that MoveOn has publicized
compelling issue-specific films (Outfoxed, Iraq for Sale),
and popularized the experience of house parties and communal
screenings. In that vein, MoveOn plans to use the summer 2007 release
of Michael Moore's new film on the pharmaceutical industry, Sicko
(which Moore describes on his blog as “a comedy about 45 million people
with no health care in the richest country on earth”), to launch a
campaign for health care reform legislation in the U.S. Asked why they
would wait months for the release of the film to address such a
pressing national issue, Dawn says, “We have a mandate to represent our
members' voices to Congress, and we need to use that mandate in the
smartest, most strategic way. Barring a reactionary legislative push in
the meantime, it just makes good sense to piggyback any lobbying or
media we do with the natural momentum of the film.”
In the meantime, MoveOn has organized more than 1,800 community screenings around the DVD release of An Inconvenient Truth
(2006), Davis Guggenheim's documentary about Al Gore's climate change
awareness crusade, and continues to organize more. The Climate
Project has teamed with the National Wildlife Federation to train
nearly 1,000 people to present Gore's slide show and lead discussions of it. The
film grossed over $25 million in theaters and is nominated for an
Oscar.
Beyond garnering a lot of buzz, the
film may be one of the crucial “tipping points” working to break the
issue of global warming out of the environmental movement ghetto in the
U.S. The year of the film's release, a sizeable contingent of
high-profile evangelical pastors signed on to an “Evangelical Climate
Initiative,” which calls for legislation requiring reductions in carbon
dioxide emissions. While there are no hard numbers on how many of these
traditional allies of the Republican Party have seen the film, the
theatrical presentation of Gore's climate change slide show does
seem to be reaching people on a level that thousands of reports and
hundreds of books have only been able to scratch. This may be due to
the simple fact that the presentation of irrefutable scientific
consensus about global warming is done in a medium with which most of
us feel comfortable and at ease: sitting in front of a screen.
But
what do people do with the information they digest after the credits
roll and it's time to take a stand? MoveOn and other lobbying groups
are encouraging viewers to write their representatives in Congress to
support legislation that would limit emissions. “After our screenings,
we encourage people to write letters to the local media and to make
formal complaints, since by law these are tracked by the FCC,” says
Susan Keith, an activist affiliated with Georgia for Democracy who
monitors media fairness. “We try to get people to call out the local
news channels when important stories are left out.” Keith organizes at
least a screening a week in the Atlanta area, many of which regularly
turn out over a hundred viewers.
Some reverberations are less
immediate, but no less dramatic. Sometimes it just takes the right
person to translate the compelling information and real life narratives
of the best documentary films into far reaching action.
I saw this inspiring phenomenon up close a few
years ago when I worked on a documentary called The Take (2004). Directed by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, The Take
explored the burgeoning movement of occupied workplaces and democratic
worker cooperatives in economically-devastated Argentina. After the
premiere in Buenos Aires, the film was screened briefly in New York
City, in the summer of 2004. Brendan Martin, a student of cooperative
economics with a background in finance, attended the screening.
“The
elections were coming up, and I guess you could say I had been
searching out alternative news sources, watching a lot of documentaries
that summer—The Corporation, Control Room,”
Martin told me over coffee during a brief visit to the U.S. “I had also
been studying cooperatives so it was interesting to me that more than
one person called me up and told me to go see this film about
Argentina, so I went. I really liked the fact that it taught huge
concepts like neoliberalism and worker democracy, and brought it down
to people's lives.”
After the screening, Martin spoke with
director Avi Lewis and asked how he could help. “He turned the question
around on me and said, ‘You tell me.' I told him I wanted to help build
a financial institution that supported the co-ops—a solidarity fund to
supply the credit that local banks were unwilling to provide.” Two
years later, Martin is living in Argentina coordinating The Working
World (www.theworkingworld.org),
which provides low-interest credit to over 150 different worker
cooperatives that are unable to secure loans from local banks. These
cooperatives employ thousands of people and produce everything from
balloons and car parts to ice cream and shoes. In an interesting twist
on art meets life, worker organizer Lalo Paret, who had played a
“starring role” in the documentary, is now an invaluable consultant to
the project.
“The film didn't teach Brendan anything new about
cooperatives,” says Avi Lewis. “What it did was focus the beam of his
attention and give it direction.”
Lewis describes The Working
World project as “the living sequel” to the film, an apt description.
The potential of the documentary medium to inspire and energize these
living sequels is perhaps one of the most exciting aspects of the
zeitgeist, one that filmmakers and activists (often one and the same)
are increasingly taking to heart.
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