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.

Read the rest of this article »

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.

Read the rest of this article »

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.

Read the rest of this article »

At the heart of Gandhi’s revolution was a new kind of hero: brave, but also compassionate; bold, but also empathetic; powerful, but also unarmed. For millennia, traditional heroism had been fueled by the implacable absolutism of the Us vs. Them script (“we are good, they are evil”) enforced by justified violence. Gandhi’s new heroism-subverting hero—whom he called a satyagrahi, a practitioner of Soulforce—bet her life on challenging and dissolving this ceaselessly reinvented and endlessly lethal dividing line.

“The Interrupters,” a new documentary from director Steve James and producer Alex Kotlowitz, vividly dramatizes this gamble in the midst of a culture of extreme youth violence on Chicago’s South and West Sides. The film is an up-to-the-minute account of the haunting terror of seemingly inescapable gang conflict that is continually threatening to spin out of control—and that often does.

What sets this sobering account apart, however, is that it settles neither for ineffectual hand wringing nor a more traditional criminal justice perspective, including prosecution and incarceration as the solution to gang violence. Instead, it tracks over the course of a year a trio of “violence interrupters” – Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams, and Eddie Bocanegra –who, like Gandhi’s satyagrahis, are nonviolent first responders intervening in numerous disputes on the streets that threaten immediate carnage but also could touch off a larger war.

Read the rest of this article »

This country is famous for one of the most organized and inspiring nonviolent movements in modern history. It unfolded sixty years ago in the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe and focused on the racism that was an unresolved legacy of the Civil War. It was brilliant, but sadly, not enough.

Last week in Mississippi, Deryl Dedmon, Jr. and John Aaron Rice, along with a group of ‘psyched up’ white teens, left a party with the intention of finding an African American to ‘mess with.’ Driving sixteen miles to the other side of town they set upon the first man they saw—James Craig Anderson—and beat him viciously. Eighteen-year-old Dedmon, now charged with murder, stayed behind long enough to run Anderson over with his truck and leave him for dead. To top it off, his lawyer went beyond human decency to protect his client, insisting that it was not a racially motivated crime.

Maybe, on some level, it’s a positive sign that we do not want to admit that there is still racism in this country, despite the experience of people living in James Craig Anderson’s community, immigrant families in Arizona, farmworkers in California, or sleeping children in Afghanistan. But denial isn’t going to make the problem go away. What will make it finally go away is a recognition that racially motivated crimes have a cause and that we can get to it by shifting our awareness from hate crimes to just simply hate.

Read the rest of this article »

With the scandal around Rupert Murdoch growing by the day, a full-fledged boycott of News Corp. has been launched on the internet. According to the Washington Post:

Boycottmurdoch.com was registered Sunday, with a plan to convince readers “that Murdoch’s tabloid news media … propagate a false image of the world, exaggerate news stories, and spin an agenda which fits Murdoch’s business interests and highly conservative political outlook.”

Boycott Murdoch Facebook and Twitter pages sprung up, garnering hundreds of followers within days.

While the boycott has recieved coverage on many mainstream news outlets, it has yet to gain much traction. The Facebook page has less than 700 fans and the Twitter page is approaching only 1,000 followers. To make even a small dent in Murdoch’s bottom line, the boycott will need to metastasize and quickly.

One thing that makes a complete boycott of all things Murdoch difficult, is the breadth of his holdings. As NPR explains, if you don’t want any of your money going to Murdoch, here are a few things that would be off limits:

• You couldn’t go see Brad Pitt and Terence Malick’s new, critically acclaimed art house film The Tree of Life. It’s distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures, a subsidiary of Fox Filmed Entertainment and NewsCorp. (That means you couldn’t watch Natalie Portman in Black Swan either.)

• You couldn’t watch any of your favorite sitcoms on the online video site Hulu.com, which is a NewsCorp joint venture with NBC Universal and Disney.

• You couldn’t watch Dog Whisperer on the National Geographic Channel. (Fox owns a majority share of the network.)

• You couldn’t read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Post.

• You couldn’t attend a Los Angeles Lakers or New York Rangers game, since Murdoch has partial ownership in both of those major league sports teams. (He also owns parts of the Staples Center and Madison Square Garden; so no Lady Gaga concerts in the Big Apple either.)

• You couldn’t watch American Idol on Fox or buy any albums or singles by the winners and contestants of the show. That means you, Crystal Bowersox fans.

• You couldn’t buy any book published by HarperCollins since NewsCorp owns that company as well. So forget picking up an extra copy of a J.R.R. Tolkien book.

• If you’re Australian, you couldn’t attend a National Rugby League game, or read GQ Australia.

While this list is only partial, boycotting Murdoch’s empire is far from impossible. It simply would mean making some sacrifices, which is necessary for all nonviolent action, and choosing more carefully which news, entertainment and sports to watch or read.

Happy World Teaser (english) from Happy World on Vimeo.

What’s life like inside a closed authoritarian country like Burma? A few years ago, it may have been hard to answer that question. Then Burma VJ, the 2010 Oscar-nominated documentary, gave us a glimpse—but mainly from the perspective of dissidents trying to depose the ruling military junta. Now, a brilliant new French documentary called Happy World shows what life is like for the ordinary every-day Burmese citizen. The film’s subtitle says it all: “the dictatorship of the absurd.”

Rather than highlight the brutality already documented in Burma VJ, the filmmakers behind Happy World seem to have set out to make the point that every regime, no matter how seemingly evil, has weaknesses—many of which reside in the arbitrary and oftentimes laughable measures it takes to uphold a thin veil of power. For the Burmese junta it’s basing traffic patterns on horoscope readings, printing currency that’s divisible by the regime’s lucky number nine, and superstitiously forcing people to grow a shrub because its name (kyet-suu) is the inverse of democracy leader Suu Kyi.

All of these ridiculous actions could easily become the target of savvy activists, who by poking fun at the junta, weaken its credibility and grow a movement of resistance. It wouldn’t be surprising if campaigns like this were already underway. As John Jackson and Steve Crawshaw noted in their book Small Acts of Resistance, a clever currency designer working for the government in 1990 subtly and subversively planted an image of Aung Sang Suu Kyi onto new banknotes, as well as several other references to the pro-democracy uprising of 1988. Such acts of defiance and inspiring mischief have seemingly grown less and less isolated.

For their own part, the filmmakers managed to pull one over on the junta, no doubt embarrassing them in the process. By posing as dopey tourists—the only kind of foreigners allowed to visit the country—they captured amazing never-before-seen footage and broadcast it to the world for free.

The full 30-minute documentary, as well as a short making-of video, can be viewed here.

How to Start a Revolution, the documentary being made on Gene Sharp and the influence of his work on democracy activists around the world, is nearing completion. After 18 months of filming, including time spent in Tahrir Square at the height of the uprising, the filmmakers have finished and moved on to the editing process. However, in order to pay for expensive archival footage, specialist post-production techniques and the publicity necessary to make an impact at festivals, they are raising money through the online funding platform Kickstarter. Based on the latest trailer, which really captures the drama of the subject matter, and what I’ve heard from friends involved in the production, this film will be a great asset to the field of civil resistance. So helping the filmmakers exceed their fundraising goal is no doubt a worthy effort. To learn more about how you can donate (and the tokens of appreciation you will receive) visit the Kickstarter page.

Last Wednesday, activists targeted the David Koch Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City. As The Other 98% writes:

1,000 people gathered to launch Koch Brothers Exposed — a new project of Brave New Foundation and The Other 98% — by projecting a short film about the billionaire Koch Brothers onto the front of the Kochs’ own building. Simultaneously, a small team of pranksters placed the giant sticker pictured above on the front of the theater. The boisterous crowd featured a live marching band, free popcorn, and – most importantly – the truth about the Koch Brothers.

In addition to the film, other images, which can be seen here, were projected on the front of the building from a hotel across the street.

While I imagine this creative tactic of projecting images or films onto buildings is nothing new, I first came across it earlier this year when street artists in Los Angeles projected an image of an antiwar mural that had been removed from  the wall of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) onto the side of the building. They also used an ingenious handmade laser graffiti gun to write messages against censorship on the museum for all passersby to see.

If you know of other examples where this tactic has been used, please share them in the comment section.