Activism

It's no ordinary day when a 90-year old grandmother sets out on a walk across the United States to make a point, and Doris "Granny D" Haddock is no ordinary woman. The protagonist of Run Granny Run spent 14 months in 2000 on her cross-country journey to bring attention to campaign finance reform.

James Cooper is one of those globetrotting guys who has more stamps in his passport than you do. A Cambridge-educated Canadian who now teaches law at California Western School of Law in San Diego, Cooper spends much of his time organizing media-related projects in Latin America, where he teaches people how to use everything from documentary films and reality TV shows, to public service announcements and animated work, to promote concepts related to the rule of law. Cooper's group, which he runs from his law school perch and an office in Santiago, Chile, is called Proyecto Acceso.

I first became aware of AIVF when Martha Gever was editor of The Independent. I marveled at this national organization that put out each month a magazine chock full of weighty, intellectual and critical articles on film and video.

“We were starving artists. Starving to feed ourselves on celluloid and barbequed chicken,” recalls filmmaker Ron Mann of the time during the late ‘70s when he hitchhiked from Paris to Cannes, slept on the beach, and carried his sleeping bag to meetings with producers. Somewhere along that route, he met director Frederick

When I started to write this article, I began with a David Letterman-esque list of 20 reasons we need AIVF. I included practical items like “to get a job,” “to fill out an IRS schedule C for an unincorporated business,” and “to find out which film festivals are scams.” But the real reason we need AIVF is to find each other. We need to know where we are.

What happened at AIVF over the last 30 years?

The concept was to bring five human rights activists from around the world to New York City for an intensive video workshop—each activist would receive their own camera. We would all brainstorm on what stories they wanted to tell about their communities and how to tell them. My task was to train the activists and later interweave their visual stories into a coherent feature-length documentary. It sounded simple enough. I had done video training workshops with grassroots activists in the past and had conducted them in different parts of the world.

There’s an old adage in the business world that you should never risk offending a client by talking about religion or politics. What to make of the film industry, then, which in recent months appears to be dispensing with that particular rule of etiquette? A series of controversial films is testing the notion that politically and religiously neutral material is required to attract large audiences. This volatile fusion between politics, religion, and success at the box office may in fact be leading to a revival of risk taking among filmmakers.

From our billboard last year we were invited on a few conservative radio talk shows, which really surprised us,” says the Käthe Kollwitz of the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous feminist arts agitation group. “But we learned something really interesting—the only thing ultra-conservatives hate more than feminism is the film industry! So they’re our new best friends!”

In the past, documentary filmmakers making issue-oriented films that promoted social change had to pound the pavement to pull together activists, educators, and the average moviegoer, as well as tell an engaging story. But the web changed all that. A filmmaker can now reach a wide audience, provide a forum for discussion, direct viewers to organizations, and even make educational guides available online. But it’s not just the web’s inherent ability to promote social change that has filmmakers exploring its capabilities.