Filmmaking as Activism: A Talk with Avi Lewis By Hannah Eaves February 17, 2005 - 3:21 PM PST "There are some things that film just does better." There is undoubtedly a stigma surrounding "activist" films. The label came into wide use mostly after Seattle's WTO conflicts of 1999. A whole new genre of protest film was spawned out of participants' indignation which, while rightfully earned, unfortunately became synonymous with activist filmmaking as a whole. But in recent years the genre has evolved into something new and exciting - political documentary filmmaking that has room for both story and character, making it much more accessible to people interested in human drama, which is most of us. The Take, an activist film, recently won the AFI Festival's International Documentary Competition Grand Jury Prize. It is the creation of - and I cringe to say it - the power couple of this world, Avi Lewis (director), former host of CBC's Counterspin and Naomi Klein (writer), author of the anti-corporation bible No Logo. It wears its roots on its sleeve - the whole film is narrated, for better or worse and with verve, by the filmmakers themselves. But the story underneath is both compelling and inspirational. When Argentina's economy collapsed in 2001, the poverty rate rose to over 60 percent. But instead of sitting quietly and waiting for an upturn, workers in Argentina decided to reverse the usual labor protest model by occupying and working in their factories, despite closures. Lewis and Klein focus on one company in particular, the Forja Auto Parts plant, and their struggle with worker-owned reclamation. The most powerful moments in the film come when regular people talk quite simply and emotionally about what they think should be basics in the workplace - pitching in to help someone out over an illness, fair distribution of wages and democratically made decisions. The power of the film is that it brings us back to some basic questions - how should things really work and are there other models we should try - without undermining its argument through bombast. And, most importantly, it shows us that if people try something different, even if they're armed with nothing but conviction, sometimes it might just work. I feel as though the activist community in some ways operates in a parallel universe to the rest of the media and the public. Frankly, I probably wouldn't have been interested in a film like The Take simply because of that label, "activist." As it was, I saw a synopsis in the AFI Festival program notes and saw the film cold, just from the synopsis. I have strong political beliefs, but somehow, the activist family seems very isolated and far away from the world I live in. What we're seeing now is an extraordinary renaissance of activist filmmaking, which really runs the whole spectrum from Michael Moore and Super Size Me to The Take and The Corporation. I think that, at some point around the protests outside the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle in 1999, there was this really powerful need for activists who were being silenced and "invisiblized" by the mainstream media to tell their own stories, basically of protests at first. We'd go to a protest and there'd be 50,000 people there and we'd read in the New York Times the next day that there were 2000. There was just a sense of outrage that we were being willfully misrepresented - criminalized and talked about as terrorists instead of as idealistic people who want to change the world. So I think that initially this whole indie media phenomenon sprung up as an alternative news force. Now that there are shows like Democracy Now! which are in hundreds of communities around the United States on public radio, doing really strong alternative journalism on a daily basis, you have the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers who are starting to tell more sophisticated, more narrative and more emotionally compelling stories. This is an opportunity not just to preach to the choir but to reach into the masses of people who don't already share your politics. To start affecting people on a different level and, with any luck, bringing people in. It's actually a quite extraordinary evolution because I think that five years ago there was a lot of what I call "protest porn" - Rage Against the Machine and slow motion shots of masked guys throwing Molotov cocktails. I think that we very consciously wanted to do something different from that. In five years it's matured so much. I think it's gratifying that the commercial success of political documentaries is providing a much larger audience for films like ours that embody fairly radical politics, but are trying to reach people in a more universal way. At the beginning of The Take, there are a lot of scenes of you and Naomi on television. I know that you worked extensively in television for years, so how did your experiences with the media feed into your decision to make this film? Naomi and I were both engaged in what was the defining debate of our time before 9/11 - the debate about globalization. Whether or not these policies that are enacted in the name of globalization - what some people call the Washington consensus, what the rest of the world calls neo-liberalism, and what we in North America call neo-conservatism - were really delivering on their promises. There is this bottomless faith in markets to produce all of the things that we want as a society, such as democracy and social justice. Also in the economic policies of privitization and deregulation and the belief in a trickle down effect which started with Reagan and Thatcher. We were engaged in a very public way in this debate and it really jumped into public consciousness in North America during the WTO protests in Seattle. A whole wave of young people got involved in politics. Obviously that was happening all over the world and for a long time, but in North America, that's what really spiked it. My show, counterSpin, which was a nightly political debate show on television in Canada, launched right at that time in 1999. Naomi was writing No Logo which ended up being translated into something like 27 languages and became a touchstone for globalization movements around the world. We were battling it out in the op-ed pages and the television studios with trade lawyers and government ministers and right-wing think tank guys. Then we both hit a kind of wall where we felt that we were actually beginning to win some of the arguments. After ten years of the NAFTA agreement between the United States and Mexico and with ten years of WTO policies having been embraced around the world, the numbers were in. While great wealth is being produced for a very small sliver of society globally, inequality is deepening in a really scary way and a lot of this privatization is leading to development in reverse, to people actually being deprived of the necessities of existence. For example, townships in South Africa being cut off from the electricity grid by the ANC government in preparation for privatization. People in Bolivia and other parts of Latin America actually paying for rain water, or being fined because they're collecting rain water as in the famous case of Bechtel's privatization of the water supply in Cochabamba. So while we were winning some of the arguments, we weren't seeing change. We felt that the debate was getting academic. We wanted to actually get out of the pundit world for a while and even out of the argument itself and get into the real lives of people who were actually building something positive, building an alternative, dreaming it into being. We needed to find something that we could support, rather than being in the endless culture of critique. I think that there was a movement in the 60s of people dropping out. We believe that you have to keep fighting on all fronts, that it would be dangerous to sort of withdraw from the public debate. We did research and found wonderful experiments in local democracy and local economic control happening all over the world. But when we landed in Argentina at the end of 2001 and found an entire country in revolt against the system, in very articulate rebellion against these very policies that we'd been critiquing and really building large scale alternatives, we knew that this was a place where something interesting was going to happen. When we decided to make the film in Argentina there were only two or three recovered companies. We went home after our first month there to raise money and we pitched a film about participatory democracy, which is definitely a big part of what goes on in the recovered companies. But when we got back to the country eight months later with a crew, two hundred factories had been taken over. Why did you decide to make a documentary instead of writing an article or a book? We talked a lot about that. For one thing, as a couple, we wanted to work together in a formal way. We'd been influencing and editing each others' work for a long time. I think part of it was finding a medium that we could share. But also, as Naomi says, it's such a dramatic and visual story, the story of Argentina's rebellion, that she really wanted people to see it. I think there's something so revolutionary about seeing soccer moms with Gucci handbags beating the crap out of bank machines. In a way, there are some things that film just does better. And also to see the emotional arc, the emotion of the struggle. Were you intimidated about making the film as a first-timer? I felt completely confident going in, which is a measure of how deluded I was. I'd been working in television for fifteen years and, in all of our meetings with the public bureaucrats and executives that we got the funding from, they kept saying., "This is the first time you've done this; we don't know if we can trust you with the money." And I was quite offended - until I got down to Argentina and realized that I was in way over my head. I believe that every filmmaker faces that and I think even really experienced filmmakers jump off a cliff and try to teach themselves how to fly while they're on the way down. I think that sense of panic definitely gives you a sense of energy that allows you to do the impossible. next >>> Index "There are some things that film just does better." "This is an incredible moment." back to past articles

Hannah Eaves Originally hailing from Australia, the home of greatly-missed Victoria Bitter and the 'laid back life,' Hannah is currently based in San Francisco. Her writing can also be found in SOMA Magazine, The Santa Cruz Sentinel and Intersection Magazine, which she co-publishes with Jonathan Marlow. February 6, 2007. Mark Savage & the D.I.Y. Aesthetic by Jeffrey M. Anderson February 3, 2007. Seeing the Humor in Sexual Identity by Michael Guillen January 29, 2007. Smokin' Aces with Joe Carnahan and Jeremy Piven by Sean Axmaker January 26, 2007. Include Me Out: Interview with Farley Granger by Jonathan Marlow January 25, 2007. Grindhouse: Chapter Four - The 1960's by Eddie Muller January 19, 2007. Charles Mudede: Zoo Story by Andy Spletzer January 19, 2007. Mark Becker: Merging the Personal and the Political by Sara Schieron January 19, 2007. Micha X. Peled: The Lives of the Sweatshop Youth by Hannah Eaves January 16, 2007. Djinn: A Taxi Driver Dreams of Perth by Jeffrey M. Anderson January 12, 2007. Clint Eastwood: Flags and Letters From the "Good War" by Jeff Shannon view past articles