Sundance 2012: Change, Movements and Revolutions

Over the past few years, the ten-day run of the Sundance Film Festival has coincided with events of historic and revolutionary import-the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009, the calamitous Haiti earthquake in 2010, the Tahir Square uprising in 2011. This year's festival showcased both panels and films that addressed change and the power of filmmaking to both capture this change and move it forward.

Jeff Skoll, the force behind Participant Media and the foundation that bears his name, is a fierce advocate of social change and the power of media to affect it. The partnership that the foundation and the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program forged five years ago under the banner Stories of Change: Social Entrepreneurship in Focus through Documentary, was on full display with a special panel that showcased some of the works-in-progress that have been nurtured through the program. The goal of this program has been to fuse partnerships between filmmakers and social entrepreneurs, enabling the film, and its intrinsic story, to serve as the conduit through which these entrepreneurs can promulgate their missions. "If you change the narrative, you can change the outcome," declared Cara Mertes, the Documentary Film Program's director, to open the panel.

Since 2007, the Stories of Change initiative has supported nearly 100 filmmaker/social entrepreneur partnership projects. The afternoon panel presented two of these projects: One, by Kief Davidson (Kassim the Dream; The Devil's Miner), tells the story of Partners in Health, an NGO committed to providing healthcare to disenfranchised communities around the world. As Partners in Health's Joia Mukherjee states in the clip that Davidson shared, "Healthcare is about something larger than medicine. It's a human right." Addressing the Sundance audience, she related her childhood memory of having encountered a leper in Kolkata (she was born in the US, to an Indian father and a white mother). "I was broken by it," she recalled, but that experience catalyzed her life journey in entrepreneurial health and activism.

The other project that the panel highlighted, Jehane Noujaim and Mona Eldaief's Solar Mamas, follows a unique endeavor created by Indian Bunker Roy, who founded Barefoot College in Rajasthan, which invites indigent grandmothers from around the world to India to teach them to build solar panels, and more important, inspire in them the verve to return to their respective villages and put their learning to good use. Noujaim's film follows one of these grandmothers from Jordan to India and back. As charismatic a documentary character as Roy is, he emphasized to Noujaim that the real story is the women. "They went from insecurity to profiles in courage," he noted on the panel. Solar Mamas will premiere in November as part of a global transmedia project entitled Why Poverty?.

From Jehane Noujaim and Mona Eldaief's Solar Mamas. Photo: Neil Davenport

Mukherjee, too, wanted to deflect Davidson's project away from her. "I was afraid of the narrative of the Great White Hope," she explained. "I have so much humility in the face of the workers we've trained." Roy echoed her sentiments in his work: "The learner is the teacher, and the teacher is the learner," he emphasized.

The forces that drive social entrepreneurship-a ground-level passion to foster change, an underdog zeal to combat injustice, an intrinsic courage to face down the gatekeepers-are the same as those that drive political movements, and over the past year, from the Arab Spring to Occupy America, we have witnessed a global rumbling with echoes of 1989 and 1968.  This spirit fueled the "Moving the Masses" panel, which included Lois Gibbs, founder of the Center for Health, Education and Justice, who is featured in Mark Kitchell's A Fierce Green Fire; Peter Staley, founder of the Treatment Action Group, and a subject in David France's How to Survive a Plague; journalist/author Naomi Wolf; and Omar Shargawai, director of ½ Revolution. Guided by moderator Richard Kim, executive editor of The Nation, the panel explored how movements work, and how they don't work. Wolf took the lead much of the afternoon, faulting the Occupy movement for not having a leader or spokesperson, or an apparatus in place to engage the media and keep the message out there. "Everyone needs to know how to be a reporter," she stressed. Staley pointed up the importance of changing tactics. In response to a question about sustaining militancy, he recalled that ACT UP, in which he played a prominent role, had staged too many demonstrations and the press stopped covering them. "You need to play to the media and give them a new show," he said.

For Shargawi, state television in Egypt was not covering the movement, "so we had to document it." He called his film-a documentation of the first 11 days of the Tahir Square uprising-"an accidental movie. What we had was more unique than news material." In reflecting a year later on the uprising, he said ruefully, "Everyone had a mutual mission. Now everyone wants power."

Omar Shargawi, filming 1/2 Revolution during the 2011 Tahir Square uprising.
Courtesy of Omar Shargawi and Karim El Hakim

Shargawi's ½ Revolution, which he directed with Karim El Hakim, is a riveting and wrenching ground-level experience of what revolution-in-progress feels like. "We're not spectators anymore," Sharagawai says while filming. "The world should know what's happening." He and Hakim take us into the streets, and though the directors withstand assaults from Mubarak's supporters, their work-in-progress is a matter of testimony, defiance and survival.

While Sharagawai and Hakim captured 11 days in the life of a nation in upheaval, Emad Burnat, a Palestinian from the village of Bil'in in the occupied West Bank territories, filmed over the course of five years the encroachment of the Israeli army and settlers on his village. 5 Broken Cameras, which he directed with Guy Davidi, an Israeli, tells a story, through the cameras in the title, of resistance, tragedy, despair and struggle. Each camera captures an episode in the story, and on two occasions, the camera actually saves Burnat's life, when bullets lodge into its housing. For Burnat, the camera serves many purposes-as protector, as weapon, as witness, as storyteller, as preserver, as documenter. And as the filmmaker and narrator, he reminds that storytelling is a matter of affirmation, survival and empowerment. He and Davidi earned the World Cinema Documentary Directing Award.

From Ernad Burnat and Guy Davidi's 5 Broken Cameras. Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival

As I write this report, another movement is afoot-in Russia, no stranger to uprisings in its rich, illustrious history. Putin's Kiss, from Lise Birk Pedersen, captures life in the Putin era, through the story of Masha Drokova, born in that epochal year, 1989, and now a rising star in the Putin-sponsored youth movement, Nashi. Running parallel to her story is that of Oleg Kashin, a journalist/blogger whose sharply critical columns against Nashi and the Russian power structure nearly cost him his life. These deftly twinned tales of youthful zeal and intrepid opposition take death-defying twists and turns, as Masha shifts gradually from passionate nationalist to disillusioned ally of the liberal intelligentsia. (According to Pedersen, she's now out of politics, and working as a PR manager at an international investment firm.) Putin's Kiss, which earned the World Cinema Cinematography Award for Documentary Filmmaking for Lars Skree, captures the making and unmaking of a political activist.

Thomas White is editor of Documentary magazine.