If you are an activist, now is the time to make a film to let more people know about your cause, and if you’re a filmmaker, especially a documentary filmmaker, now is the time to become an activist. Why?
Many of us working in the visual/vision business have seen something happen in the last few years. It has changed everything about documentaries. Reality TV has become the dominant pop TV entertainment by borrowing documentary techniques. In order for a documentary to stand out today, it’s not enough for it to be informative. It has to be about something. It has to take a stand. It has to address larger issues. Or it’s toast. Bring on the meaning and speak to a tribe of people who care about your cause, or drown in the ocean of media washing up on our electronic shore. Standing out, and doing meaningful work, has never been more important than it is now.
Incubating powerful documentaries is the work of Film Independent’s 2011 Documentary Lab. This is a seven-week program giving creative feedback to Documentary Lab fellows on their works-in-progress. It happens every spring, and several of the directors and producers involved this year were kind enough to speak with me about what they’re working on.
The Light In Her Eyes promises to be a game-changer. The film covers a world rarely seen by outsiders by going inside a mosque in Damascus, where a woman is teaching the Qur’an and personal empowerment to other women. One of my first questions to the directors, Julia Meltzer and Laura Nix, was how can you put teaching the Qur’an and personal empowerment for women together in the same sentence, then alone in a film. Their answer revealed to me why more and more women are choosing Islam and joining the mosque movement throughout the Muslim world.
“There’s an entire generation of women who are becoming leaders within their Islamic communities,” Julia Meltzer said. “This is what is often referred to as the mosque movement, and it’s not just happening in Syria, it’s happening all over the Middle East.”
Laura Nix added, “I think women are choosing Islam because the mosque is a place where young people can have a voice.” In the West, “we don’t understand that in those societies there are not public places where people go and can talk about their needs and desires and expectations and hopes and dreams. The mosque offers a place for that.”
Julia Meltzer was a Fulbright Fellow in Damascus in 2005-6, which was how she was introduced to Muslim culture in a way most of us Westerners never see. She’s made five award-winning documentary projects. Laura Nix, producer of The Yes Men Fix the World and many other documentaries, joins Julia in this journey into the heart of the mosque movement.
“We live in a country that has a problem with Islam,” Julia said. “There are clearly huge prejudices, huge biases, and an incredible amount of misinformation. So as filmmakers, I believe that what we’re doing is to give information about a culture so that people can change their perception.”
The Doc Lab has many other films it is nurturing, including Call Me Kuchu, which is following the fight for justice and freedom on the front lines of Africa’s gay rights movement. It has a website and it just started a funding campaign on Kickstarter.
Julia and Laura will finish The Light in Her Eyes this fall, and they’re aiming for a festival release next year.
You see the wedding announcement? The Huffington Post was bought by AOL. Some money changed hands, like the $315 million kind, which is about $315 million more than I’ve ever been paid for writing for The Huffington Post. I’ve always viewed writing for Huffpo as a service and I’ve actually liked doing it for free. There’s been freedom in free, because you serve no one but your conscience and your inner master. Some things a person does should be like that. But when it comes to this acquisition, it’s the freedom thing that concerns me.
When I worked for NBC, I witnessed how an investigative producer tracking a story was stopped dead in his tracks by his own bosses. Seems that the trail he was tracking led to a company that was doing business with GE, and since GE owned NBC – they killed the story. I ran up against something like that, but not nearly as journalistically pure, while working on a story that later got an innocent man out of jail. While reporting it, I got some prosecutors mad. They had connections with the corporate leadership at NBC. The result wasn’t pretty when they dropped the hammer on me. So I wonder what happens when Huffpost tries to cover something the corporate overlords at AOL don’t like? Let me answer that question with another.
Have you ever seen a documentary called The Corporation? The thesis is that if a corporation was a person, it would be a sociopath.
Big-bigger-biggest isn’t necessarily better. I know you have to pay off your investors and Arianna Huffington had a few. I realize businesses have to grow and change. Bloomberg Businessweek has written that “the greatest business successes are often engineered by bold visionaries who altered industries.” Thing is, those visionaries don’t always marry off so well. Their suitors want to buy their success but can’t deal with their quirks.Take a look at AOL and Time Warner. eBay and Skype.
Big mergers and acquisitions can turn into corporate date rape. Ford bought Volvo, then sold it to the Chinese carmaker Geely. Ford also bought Jaguar and Land Rover and sold those brands to Tata Motors of India. When you start trading off a Swedish brand to a Chinese company, what does Volvo stand for anymore? Am I buying a Swedish-Chinese car? Of course, some big mergers do work. In 1965, Pepsi and Frito-Lay merged to form PepsiCo and they’ve been killing us with sugar, salt and carbs ever since, so at least that makes me feel good.
I hope Arianna can hang on to the Huffpost brand, which is rebellious, contrarian and yes, unabashedly progressive. The Skype guys tried to buy their company back from eBay, because eBay has no soul. Want proof? eBay allows puppy mills to list in its classifieds. How’s that corporate sociopathic behavior working for ya?
Give it a couple years and Arianna might need to buy back her vision from AOL.
I am a dedicated hater of Disney. Some days I set aside an hour just so that I can hate the logo. It looks like a cute mouse, but it’s really a corporate monolith that lives and breathes the profit motive. Nearly all Disney lawyers have sharp teeth and scary-long fingernails, and Disney sends its representatives into hospital maternity wards to give product demos and take emails from new moms so they can market to babies fresh from the womb.
Actually, one part of that sentence is true: The part about maternity wards and marketing to newborns. It’s true: Disney is going into hospitals and giving away a onesie and taking the mom’s email. It sounds generous, but it’s just another corporate invasion of marketing into life, and they also put a chip into each onesie to program the newborn to like Disney products.
Actually, only one part of that sentence is true. The second part, about the chip implant, is what they wish they could do, because they are closed source, not open source.
Bear with me a sec? I can explain this. Disney is closed source because it protects its intellectual “property,” even through much of that “property” originated in the public domain. Disney will sue you over your use of anything having to do with Snow White, even though nobody really owns the character of Snow White because she was created a while ago. Disney and Viacom and other big companies take ownership over lots of free media and charge us to enjoy it. We aren’t allowed to mix it or play with it, because it’s “theirs.” It’s not really, but their lawyers have sharp teeth and scary-long fingernails. Closed source means somebody can sue you. Closed source is the mark of monoliths like Microsoft who are working from the past.
Open source is different. WordPress, which is what I’m using to publish this blog, is open source. Anybody can use it, modify it, play with it. It’s free. Open VBX is another example. It’s a free interface for internet telephones, and it works with Twilio.com, a cloud computing app which is not free, but open source and cheap. Open source is good and can be used to do good. Open Architecture Network shares designs for housing, schools and community centers over the world. Its designs serve people in need. The platform? A free, open source platform called Drupal.
Open source is the future and closed source is the past.
Closed Source: The New York Times: Nice people, but they’re rumored to be on life support. It will help their longevity to keep the use of their online material free and not go to mandatory subscriptions.
Closed source: Facebook. Facebook content can’t be openly searched. Give Facebook time – it will have to become open source to survive.
Special case: The Huffington Post. It’s open source content, because people like me can write for it, but it was just acquired by one of the most evil closed source companies, AOL. What does that mean? Tell you in next week’s 500.
Back from an action-packed two days of production in San Francisco on SHELTER. While the mind is willing at this hour, the typing fingers are weak. I’m going to give it a shot anyway, because I get to talk to a lot of visionaries while working on SHELTER. It’s always good to write about that. Seth Wachtel just returned from Haiti with stories to tell about tent cities that reached all the way to the airport.
He saw mothers praying over scraps of fabric that once clothed their children. The children are gone; the scraps were all they had.
Seth, the Director of the Architecture and Community Design Program at University of San Francisco, is working on building a medical center and other projects, and he saw signs of tremendous courage and optimism in Haiti.
After our interview with Seth, went to Kevin Rowell’s place. Kevin was living in Haiti for 11 months, since the earthquake, working with builders and community leaders to create sustainable shelter and building systems. Kevin works with Kleiwerks International and he told a moving story of Haitian community leaders who were puzzled (to put it politely) about why they received emergency relief housing that was made of metal — metal that gets hot enough in the Haitian climate to seem to cook the people inside. “I could build something better myself,” said one of the community leaders. Kevin has the great gift of listening to people, really hearing them, and then finding ways to create action from their feelings and ideas. Here’s a video from Kleiwerks that Kevin narrated.
First thing this morning we met architect, professor and author Eric Corey Freed. He’s a funny guy, with a snappy wit and sharp intellect, and therefore it’s no mystery why he’s sought after by corporations and others as a keynote speaker.
We had to look for a good filming location, moving the crew to avoid thumping air compressors, crying babies and distant train whistles, all the things show up as soon as we start the camera.
Eric told me stories about how he tours cities with local leaders who want to know why nobody comes to their downtown. The answer is simple: Those cities, and so many others, have done lots of things to take people away from the city: they’ve built freeways out of town and big box stores and neglected the human scale that breathes life into design. Good design changes everything. Eric made the connection between the foundational work being done in Haiti right now and how it will benefit our own cities. He brought into focus why the design-for-good movement is gaining power.
We wrapped out the day with informative interviews at Architecture for Humanity. Gretchen Mokry, a program manager there, got her arms around the array of projects that AfH has going all over the world, and Sandhya Naidu Janardhan, a program coordinator, gave us specifics about construction training and managerial programs AfH is pursuing in Haiti. AfH has been a good friend to us as we put SHELTER together. Another great friend to SHELTER is John Peterson of Public Architecture. He did an interview for us earlier this week, conducted by my colleague Richard Neill, and he was one of the guiding forces behind Public Architecture’s new book about the power of pro bono work.
Next? Putting this all together for our Sundance Institute application. We’re cutting the trailer next week. A big thank you to Joel Goodman, who will be providing music.
It’s been a year since the earthquake hit Haiti and things have not gotten better. The New York Times ran an interactive graphic this week showing before and after aerials. The after shows the growing mass of tents in Port-au-Prince that stand in for real shelter.
This week, I spoke with several people who are working to make that better, to shrink the tent city and replace it with real housing. They are going to be part of our movie, SHELTER.
We’re raising money for SHELTER on a person-to-person basis, using IndieGoGo to get the word out. The process has been fascinating. Family and friends have helped, of course, but people donate every day who are unknown to me. They’re just interested in the issue of shelter and in finding better ways to create it. As some of you have heard me say, I only meet visionaries when working on this film. Would you like to meet a few of them?
Seth Wachtel is in Haiti right now looking at Gingerbread houses. Only he calls them “vernacular architecture.” Seth directs the Architecture and Community Design program at the University of San Francisco, and along with a few other activist architects, he’s discovered a mystery about the traditional style of building in Haiti. The quaint Gingerbread houses, made of a light timber frame and bricks, survived the quake. Concrete structures that were newer fell and killed people. Seth is in Haiti this week talking to older contractors who know how to build in the Gingerbread style. He wants to learn their secrets. He’s also working on a collaborative “wiki” project to document the architectural and cultural heritage of local building styles using cellphone pictures posted by Haitians and also via texting, since cellphones are so common there. Seth is snapping some pictures for us while he’s in Haiti and we’re going to interview him on camera when he gets back.
Andy Meira is also in Haiti, attending the opening of the old Iron Market. The architecture firm he works for, John McAslan + Partners, has been restoring the market with funding assistance from the Clinton Foundation. It is the first major building project to be realized since the catastrophe, and for some has become a symbol of Haiti’s recovery. The McAslan group just sent me photographs of the restored market, and I’ll be running more of them in a story tomorrow on the SHELTER blog. We’ll be interviewing Andy Meira for SHELTER.
The Design for Good movement is gathering force, and much of the movement is focused in the Bay Area. Seth Wachtel is there, and Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr of Architecture for Humanity (both potential interviewees), and Michelle Kaufmann, a pioneer in sustainable housing. There’s Eric Corey Freed, who will be part of SHELTER as he discusses how conceptual design failures become social failures in cities. Bruce Lebel, in Northern California, continues to work for affordable housing for the homeless here and in Haiti. In Southern California, Orlando Ward is working as an advocate for the homeless at the Midnight Mission. Over on the SHELTER blog, I’ll be profiling these folks so you can see what they’re up to. You can sign up for the mailing list or for the RSS feed. You can also learn about how to donate to the film. For now, I have a wish list for you.
I would like to interview two people about Haiti: Bill Clinton and Wyclef Jean. If anybody has any contacts with either, would you let me know? Thanks.
Photo Credit: Seth Wachtel, University of San Francisco. Iron Market, Allison Shelley.
I am a dedicated hater of Disney. Some days I set aside an hour just so that I can hate the logo. It looks like a cute mouse, but it’s really a corporate monolith that lives and breathes the profit motive. Nearly all Disney lawyers have sharp teeth and scary-long fingernails, and Disney sends its representatives into hospital maternity wards to give product demos and take emails from new moms so they can market to babies fresh from the womb.
Seth Wachtel is in Haiti right now looking at Gingerbread houses. Only he calls them “vernacular architecture.” Seth directs the Architecture and Community Design program at the University of San Francisco, and along with a few other activist architects, he’s discovered a mystery about the traditional style of building in Haiti. The quaint Gingerbread houses, made of a light timber frame and bricks, survived the quake. Concrete structures that were newer fell and killed people. Seth is in Haiti this week talking to older contractors who know how to build in the Gingerbread style. He wants to learn their secrets. He’s also working on a collaborative “wiki” project to document the architectural and cultural heritage of local building styles using cellphone pictures posted by Haitians and also via texting, since cellphones are so common there. Seth is snapping some pictures for us while he’s in Haiti and we’re going to interview him on camera when he gets back.
Andy Meira is also in Haiti, attending the opening of the old Iron Market. The architecture firm he works for, John McAslan + Partners, has been restoring the market with funding assistance from the Clinton Foundation. It is the first major building project to be realized since the catastrophe, and for some has become a symbol of Haiti’s recovery. The McAslan group just sent me photographs of the restored market, and I’ll be running more of them in a story tomorrow on the 
