The Role of Documentaries: This is Not About Michael Moore

I've been privileged to watch some excellent documentaries lately: Kassim the Dream at American Film Institute's Silver Theatre in Silver Spring; Taxi to the Dark Side and Bishar Blues at Busboys and Poets near U Street. The stories presented in these three were all moving enough to enlarge my personal view of the world. A brief description of each:

• Kassim the Dream is the story of a Ugandan immigrant to America who struggles with his boxing career at the same time that he tries to come to terms with his past as a child soldier in the army and the friends, family, and displaced persons left behind.
• Taxi to the Dark Side delves into the horrific practices by the US Army (and the policies that enabled them) in American prisons abroad and at Guantanamo, centering around the story of a taxi driver whose fate is to suffer and die from fatal blows to the legs - all in the name of collecting foreign intelligence.
• Bishar Blues tells the story of the fakirs in Bengal, India, who struggle to transcend religious classification and caste limits in a society that ostracizes them for their earnest practice. Their beliefs celebrate the holiness within people and are a modern manifestation of the human lifestyle of Mohammed (and Jesus, for that matter) before institutional structure began to dominated these ideologies.
  

Though vastly different in subject matter, the obvious common thread is a portrayal of people who have been marginalized, intended to be digested and enjoyed by a broader audience. Is shining the public, artistic light on the small stories then the purpose of most or all documentaries? To explore this idea a bit, I turn to a Chilean documentalist I briefly researched for a Spanish class report on art during Pinochet's reign of terror.

Patricio Guzman is a famed documentalist born in Chile in the 1940s who was left his country when Augusto Pinochet, supported by the United States, took power from Salvador Allende in a coup that ushered in an era of murder and missing persons, quieted journalists, and stolen livelihoods. His first film, La Batalla de Chile (The Battle of Chile) documented the coup and was nominated by CINEASTE, an American magazine on the art and politics of the cinema, as one of the top 10 political films in the world.

Guzman has a lot to say about the importance of the making of documentaries. In Spanish and then in English, two quotes from his website:

"No todos los documentalistas somos cazadores de eventos, sino que también somos poetas, que tratamos de encontrar en el tiempo y espacio reales las huellas de la gente, aún las más ínfimas," y "Un país sin cine documental es como una familia sin album de fotografias."

"Not all makers of documentaries are hunters of current events, rather we are also poets that try to find in contemporary time and space the paths of the people, even the smallest," and "A country without documentary film is like a family without a photo album."

For Chile, his films serve to remember the awful events of the reign of terror that forever changed their lives and their relationship to their home. They are a remembrance that begins to do justice to the desaparecidos, who went missing from their families never to be heard from again (and who probably faced fates as dark as torture and mass, unmarked graves). Here, the documentaries are more than an educational film about people without the glamour to make it into a media dominated by celebrities and economics. You and I are united through these films with a marginalized people through knowledge of their struggle. To return to Kassim, the dramatization of dark events brings emotional release, and enables us to live more humanely like the fakirs of Bengal in Bishar Blues.

Update (19/7/08): A new website is making documentaries available for free viewing online. Kudos to them for using the internets for its most edifying purpose: worldwide distribution!

Weekend Update: Life on the Hill

At the beginning of this month, I finally got over my fear of spending money on living expenses and moved out of MD and into a really excellent community house in the Capitol Hill/Eastern Market area of DC. Yes, it's Southeast -- but around here that means shaded streets and whiffs of lavender from miniscule front yards, an arts workshop and a public library, and fresh produce from the farmers on the weekends (which can be supplemented by Yes! Market natural food store when needed).

I live in a house with 9 other people, most of whom are working on the policy-related nonprofit end of social justice and poverty campaigns. Some are faith-based, but not all; many share international interest and I've learned a lot about some topics I only knew a little about before -- NAFTA in Latin America, U.S. pesticide companies' conflicts of interest in the War on Drugs, debt forgiveness in Africa, and all about German customs, including all-night wedding bashes.

Life in the city hasn't been all gloom and circumstance, though! Here are some fun things I did in the past few weeks that make my days in MD look pretty tame:

• Visiting Dumbarton Oaks in upper Georgetown: a lovely estate turned into a Harvard-run botanic conservatory and center for archaic arts (Byzantine, ancient Greek?). There's an awesome mosaic garden of stones all precisely oriented in swirling patterns and vibrant earthy colors.. and some nice flowers too.
  
• Hitting up one of my favorites in Dupont circle with an old friend (and fellow Merckie) -- Teaism. There are several locations around the city, but their tea-house atmosphere, hot and cold beverage variety, and veg-friendly asian food can't be beat.
• A wandering, though brief, visit to The National Art Gallery. There are so many great things to do on the mall, though I regret that much of the huge, two-building facility seems to be poorly explained by even sparser text. They have nice large-space art installations, and some cutout pieces by Matisse were a good feature, though the Afghanistan exhibit was way too crowded to enjoy properly.
  
• The American Film Institute's SilverDOCS festival in Silver Spring screening of Kassim the Dream. The main character and his coach cum adopted uncle and guiding force stood up during the questions to the director session at the end! Kassim was taken into the army in Uganda as a child and used Boxing as a way to deal with the day-time images of horror that continued to dog him after escaping to the U.S. His story of redemption was funny and packed a punch. The film from the Displaced Person camps in Uganda were particularly powerful.

I'm still working on doing the whole biking to work thing, and I'm looking forward to the Corcoran's exhibit on AIDS photography in Africa called Access to Life and a National's game this Friday. Did I mention I also started up the compost heap here? I'm the resident enviro-nut.. and loving it.

So, consider this your open invite, my readers, to come and do fun things in DC with me -- there is no shortage of them to be had.

A Progressive Extravaganza

The following is a non-exhaustive list of progressive organizations and entities (loosely categorized) I was, am, or could be interested in. I post it for two reasons:
a. I'm constantly misplacing the bits of paper I record them on, when they are recorded at all, and
b. because other people might be interested in them, too!
It also doesn't suit me to make my Launch Pad on the left much longer than it is now. I'll probably update this every so often.

In no particular order, other than the order they came to me:

Topics:
NY Times letters from Amory Lovins
Failure of the Appropriate Technology Movement [requires jstor access]
dcjobs.com, indeed.com, idealist.org, marylandjobnetwork.com, US Gov't Jobs

Movies/Documentaries:
Who Killed the Electric Car?,
The End of Suburbia
An Inconvenient Truth
Affluenza: The Epidemic of Overconsumption [recently added!]

Books:
The Omnivore's Dilemma
Affluenza
Not Buying It [recently added]

Organizations and Projects:
Maryland Conservation Corps [recently added]
The Post-Carbon Institute [recently added]
The Rocky Mountain Institute: Abundance by Design
The Society of Ecological Restoration
Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology
Redefining Progress
Design that Matters
International Development Enterprises
Engineers without Borders
Design Corps
KickStart: The Tools to End Poverty
Solar Electric Light Fund
Women Entrepreneurs of Baltimore
Woods End Research Lab
The US Composting Council
Biodegradable Products Institute
The Institute for Local Self-Reliance
Design for the Other 90% Resources Page
Green Living, Natural Foods Links at Roots [recently added]

And here's a quote or two, just for fun:

"The new problems are not the consequences of incidental failure but of technological success."
Small is Beautiful
E.F. Schumacher


"In 1967, two-thirds of American college students said 'developing a meaningful philosophy of life' was 'very important' to them, while fewer than one-third said the same thing about 'making a lot of money.' By 1997, those figures were reversed."
Affluenza by De Graaf, Wann, and Naylor
and The Post-Corporate World, David Korten