A Spoonful of Sugar
Several documentaries from this year Festival are about individuals who have attempted to right large-scale wrongs. So how can you become an activist?
“They need to feel they’re alive, to feel they have a life to document while the rest of the world has forgotten them.”
– Burma VJ director Anders Østergaard
– Burma VJ director Anders Østergaard
Films about activists and their causes may carry with them that icky, about-to-ingest-cough-syrup feeling that you’re going to be “educated” – not actually inspired, but “inspired,” in that earnest, cloying, and didactic way – but they also have the power to change viewers’ consciousness about the issues they address. The filmmakers at the Festival whose documentaries are about one individual attempting to right large-scale wrongs still want us to feel so moved by their heroes’ actions that we leave the theatre and get involved in the cause to one degree or another.
“We’re not making a movie – we’re trying to change the world,” Louie Psihoyos, the executive director of the Oceanic Preservation Society says about his documentary The Cove. If there’s any documentary at the Festival this year that could be called an advocacy film, The Cove is it. But The Cove is also something of a revelation; it’s about Ric O’Barry, the dolphin trainer who taught the five dolphins who variously starred in Flipper, the ‘60s TV series. Just after the series ended, O’Barry became a tireless activist fighting people who trap bottlenose dolphins and send them off to amusement parks or swim-with-dolphins programs.
Psihoyos knows that audiences may think of watching a movie about a dolphin activist as akin to “taking medicine,” as he puts it. “We’re trying to make a film that’s entertaining and educational,” he says. “This movie is the product of watching too many Jacques Cousteau and James Bond movies.”
Like some other films in the Festival lineup, The Cove subverts expectations about what a documentary profile of an activist has to be. “I make a certain kind of film,” says veteran doc maker Joe Berlinger (Brother’s Keeper, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster). “They’re ambiguous, they allow all parties to have their say, and to me that’s a more accurate way to make a film, warts and all.” So when he realized that one of the subjects of his new film Crude, the persuasive and larger-than-life activist attorney Steven Donziger, wanted a film touting the David-vs.-Goliath fight in Ecuador to make Chevron pay for years of environmental damage, he had to think twice about whether he wanted to participate in the project at all. “It was difficult to take on a film whose subject was wanting an advocacy film,” Berlinger says. “And that’s what [Crude] is – there’s a need to help these people in Ecuador – but I try to subvert that to some extent because I do quote Chevron.”
“I feel like one of the things about activism is that you end up feeling really disillusioned and you don't have a voice, or you have a voice and that voice isn't enough,” says Emily Kunstler. She should know: her father was civil rights attorney William Kunstler, the man famous for flamboyantly defending the Chicago Seven, the American Indian Movement leaders, and Lenny Bruce, among many others. Emily and her sister Sarah Kunstler, the directors of William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, realized after making their early advocacy films, some of which have helped to stay imminent executions, that “to make a film gives you such a greater voice” than what one person’s activism alone can do.
Ngawang Choephel also compels us to care about a cause by making the cause personal. Watching his documentary Tibet in Song, it’s clear the cause could be nothing less than personal for Choephel, who is Tibetan, but grew up in exile in India. Music, and in particular native Tibetan music, is Choephel’s life. Choephel opens a new window into the depths the Chinese government has gone to to eradicate Tibetan culture. The Chinese effort to outlaw the public performance of Tibetan music – a vital element of Tibetan culture – and substitute it with syrupy Tibetan-like songs that praise China has been irrevocably successful. In fact, Choephel went to prison for performing Tibetan music.
The nervy videographers at the heart of Danish director Anders Østergaard’s Burma VJ also battle a totalitarian state whose spies may be nowhere or everywhere at once. If that sounds paranoid, try imagining the life of a Burmese activist attempting to document the military government’s abuses: using small video cameras, the activists in Burma VJ record government injustices and get the footage smuggled across the border into Thailand. A leader there then ships the footage to Norway, where the footage is then broadcast to the world and also back into Burma, where hopefully the citizens will see it and rise up against the injustices. If one step in the process goes awry, the videographer is likely to be arrested. “What the hell on earth drives them?” Østergaard wondered when he began the film. “There’s no prospect of changing regimes. I was fascinated. It’s kind of existential: they need to do it, to feel they’re alive, to feel they have a life to document while the rest of the world has forgotten them.”
The hopeful premise at the heart of these documentaries is the conviction that if viewers are shown compelling footage of the injustices happening around the world, we might even act to nullify them. But two other documentaries at the Festival profoundly question that notion. It’s no surprise they’re both about reporters who have spent their lives trying to effect large societal change. Reporter is Eric Daniel Metzgar’s thoughtful analysis of the work of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Kristof is credited with alerting powerful leaders through his ongoing columns about the genocidal crisis in Darfur. (One of the warlords Kristof interviews in the film, Congolese rebel leader Laurent Nkunda, was finally arrest on Thursday night.) Metzgar asks why we feel drawn to the story of one person’s suffering while ignoring large-scale injustice. “We're not bad people if we get numbed by statistics,” he says. “It's a biological reaction that stems from the reality that we didn't know how to evolve to care about massive numbers of people on the other side of the world suffering.”
Anna Politkovskaya, the 211th journalist killed in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union, was a crusading reporter who also told the stories of those who suffered political injustice. But when she continued to expose the Russian government’s brutal tactics to quash the Chechen people’s attempts to break away from Russia, she paid for that work with her life. The most unforgettable moments in 211: Anna, Giovanna Massimetti and Paolo Serbandini’s elegiac film about Politkovskaya, occur when it’s revealed that Politkovskaya felt an acute sense of despair after subscriptions to the newspaper she was writing for dropped as she continued to write about the war in Chechnya. “The population didn’t want to know,” her editor says in the film. “She was devastated by this and wondered if she should give up.” “The most important thing is that in a country like Russia, where public opinion never existed, Anna with each of her articles and by her own life contributed to the development of a civil society,” Massimetti says.
Sometimes it feels like even that isn’t enough. “I'm always questioning the value of documentary films and how impactful they are versus dropping the camera and trying to focus on human rights work,” Reporter filmmaker Metzgar says. “But I guess I see the world in such a way that making art is kind of my activism, I guess – not to sound pretentious about it. I have to reorganize what I've seen to better understand it.” The Cove director Louie Psihoyos would agree: “Once people have the information, it’s really difficult to not have that information any more.”
