Minnesota winters can be brutally cold, full of ice and snow, and drearily bleak come this time of year. And while this year’s winter has been unexpectedly mild and inconsistent, with temperatures fluctuating from well-below freezing to the high 40s—likely due to the instability of climate change—we still look for ways to escape cabin fever. The Frozen River Film Festival (FRFF), on the banks of the Mississippi River in Winona, Minnesota, was just the break I needed. But it was also an inspiring weekend full of hopeful films, cinematic social critique, information tables, and workshops on the environment and activism.

The festival, which began in Winona in 2006, shows films from Mountainfilm—a film festival held in Telluride, Colorado in May that takes its films on tour throughout the rest of the year. Mountainfilm “is dedicated to educating and inspiring audiences about issues that matter, cultures worth exploring, environments worth preserving and conversations worth sustaining.” Likewise, the FRFF—whose films are a combination of the Mountainfilm Tour and locally or regionally-submitted films—has a similar mission:

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Among the films shortlisted for an Academy Award next month is the powerful documentary If a Tree Falls. It chronicles the house arrest of Daniel McGowan, an environmental activist facing life in prison for the arson of an Oregon lumber company, and the movement to which he belonged, the Earth Liberation Front.

Far from taking sides, the film explores the middle and complex ground between martyrdom and terrorism–the latter being how the United States government saw McGowan’s actions. No matter how one feels about such volatile property destruction, it would be difficult, however, to leave the film without feeling some sympathy for McGowan. Perhaps it’s his own self-reflection and ultimate remorse that does it. But credit the filmmakers for creating an atmosphere conducive to humanization.

As director Marshall Curry noted in a recent interview, “It took a lot of time just explaining to people we were honestly interested in their point of view, and the film wasn’t going to be their point of view but it would reflect their point of view. That we were interested in having the best arguments from different sides bang against each other, rather than setting up straw men to knock down.”

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An exciting new cross-media project called Everyday Rebellion has launched its Advent Calender of Nonviolent Struggle, in which Srdja Popovic will offer a short tip for activists every day until Christmas.

The video above is about the role of humor in nonviolent action. Others address the importance of having numbers and an appealing vision for the future to success in nonviolent struggle, among many other topics. (To watch and share these tips as they are posted, follow the project’s YouTube channel.)

As we’ve mentioned many times before, Popovic was one of the leaders of Otpor, the nonviolent movement that brought down Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, and now runs the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) in Belgrade.

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The past month has seen a startling growth in creative means to improve “communication” with the 1%. We’ll showcase three of the latest educational tactics. On November 3rd, for example, members of Occupy Chicago introduced Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin to the mic check. An elite, obviously well dressed audience was saved from a potentially dreadful speech and disabused of any notion that “business as usual” can still occur, even in the elegant setting of the Urban League Club, without the participation of the rest of us.

Do note how seamlessly the protesters were embedded in the crowd. They had not only paid to attend, but had enjoyed a sumptuous breakfast and politely listened to speakers preceding the governor, apparently without raising the suspicions of security. Successful infiltration requires a detailed attention to current fashions, a quality sadly lacking in many Occupy circles. Fortunately, the Urban League Club had posted their dress code online. For those of you anticipating attending future corporate meetings, let me suggest perusing the fashion section of Billionaires for Wealthcare, or you might want to read this excellent posting on “How to Dress Like a Republican.”

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Did I get your attention? While titles that draw attention to women’s physical features may summon most of the male population, a title like, Women, War and Peace was probably written off as a women-only television series. You know: “girl’s stuff” or women-as-victims drama.

Over the past month, the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired a fascinating series that showed real women around the world in their roles as serious nonviolent organizers. The five-part film series, now completely available online, offers five cases of women’s activism in the following contexts (I have edited the website’s language with a nonviolent conflict perspective, bolding the significant political achievements of their efforts):

I Came to Testify is a story of how 16 Bosnian women who had been imprisoned and raped by Serb-led forces in the Bosnian town of Foca broke history’s great silence – and stepped forward to take the witness stand in an international court of law. Their courage resulted in a triumphant verdict that led to new international laws about sexual violence in war.

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The scripts run deep.

Faced with violence or injustice, we’ve often been trained by our families, our media, and our societies to react in one of three basic ways: avoidance, accommodation or violence. These well-grooved neural pathways are not only moral positions—they are often survival strategies. Not getting involved, going along or meeting violence with violence promises us survival and safety.

These scripts, though, often upend this promise by failing to engage deeply and effectively with the realities at hand. The conflicts in our lives or our world have a life of their own, feeding and stoking the embers of fear, powerlessness, despair and retaliation if they’re not dealt with. Often it’s only a matter of time before another fire gets rolling.

In spite of the tenacity of these scripts, a nonviolent shift is underway. This doesn’t mean a utopia free of violence and injustice is coming. Instead, it means we are steadily creating resources and practices that equip more and more people to deal effectively with the violence they face. This transition, in fact, also includes a shift of thinking for those of us who are peacemakers: from a vision of establishing an impossibly idealistic world to one where, while still facing violence and injustice, tools for nonviolent transformation are more plentiful, accessible, and increasingly the default.

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A more fitting debut could not have been conceived for the new feature documentary “How to Start a Revolution,” given its world premiere on September 18th as part of the 27th annual Boston Film Festival. In attendance were the director, Ruaridh Arrow, as well as a few of the people featured in the film: Robert Helvey, Jamila Raqib, and the man himself, Gene Sharp. At 83 years old and with rather limited mobility, Dr. Sharp  rarely makes public appearances these days. But the several hundred who had turned out to see him in Boston were by no means disappointed, responding with at least three standing ovations on the afternoon. For those of us lucky enough to have been there and hear him speak, including a number of his close friends and colleagues, it was impossible not to recognize the deep significance of the moment, with the humble Dr. Sharp visibly moved by the outpouring of support.

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Little Town of Bethlehem shares the life stories of three different people who grew up within the cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, and who each chose nonviolence as their ways of life. I deliberately selected a Muslim, a Jew and a Christian because the three faiths are seen as reasons for war, and because the three faiths are all commanded to love their neighbors.

I recognize that every story is someone’s perspective and therefore it can be said that every story has some level of bias. At the same time, the art of storytelling is about exploring the human condition. Whatever bias exists the audience is going to see it, and that is going to tell them something as well. It is going to tell them if the protagonists and filmmakers are honest, and if there is anything rewarding to learn from their perspectives. In the end the audience remembers a film or story because they believe they gained something from it, and that the story reveals something worthwhile about our common humanity. In as many words that describes why I wanted to make this film and what I wanted the film to achieve. I believe the voices of nonviolence are an underrepresented perspective and they tell us a great deal about ourselves.

We started filming in Jordan and southern Lebanon just after the 2007 war between Israel and Lebanon. It wasn’t the best time for an American film team to be in southern Beirut. Many of the craters had signs over them saying “Made in America,” in reference to the arms support America provides Israel. I knew that this was going to be a hard film to make and that many of my friends in America would not understand why we were doing this. At the same time I was challenged by what this story said about us—and by us I mean humanity. I knew that whatever the cost this was an important story to know for myself and to share with my friends and the world.

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Our friends at Narco News TV have just produced another episode of their excellent series of interviews with the people who made the revolution in Egypt happen. (Don’t miss the last one, with blogger and viral video producer Aalam Wassef.) This time the star is Mohammad Abbas, who was a young member of the Muslim Brotherhood when the uprising broke out in January. He narrates its beginnings, and explains its roots in decades of organizing and coalition building. Even so, what happened on January 25th seemed to him nothing short of a miracle.

The recent British film In Our Name is a returning-soldier drama featuring a married woman, Suzy, who leaves her husband and little girl to fight in Iraq. Because she’s involved in the killing of a little girl during her tour—this part is based on a true story, but it happened to a man—she returns home only to steadily fall apart under the stress of soul-destroying anxieties.

In real life, Ethan McCord was involved in a now-infamous episode that took a strangely similar turn. It became one of the most shocking (and hopefully awakening) revelations by Wikileaks: the video now dubbed “Collateral Murder” that was taken from an Apache helicopter as its gunners massacred a group of civilians in a Baghdad suburb in 2007. Addressing a Southern California audience about his role in the episode this past June, McCord described how he saw two small children mangled by gunfire from the helicopter and thought of his own two children at home.

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