Documentary filmmaker Audrey Ewell was at her home in Brooklyn, New York, on Oct. 1, 2011, watching live stream coverage of protesters of the then little-known movement known as Occupy Wall Street marching over the Brooklyn Bridge. Suddenly hundreds of people were being arrested, while others shouted: “We are not the criminals.”
Then the screen went black because whoever was filming ran out of batteries. Ewell switched to television news channels and saw nothing.
She and her film partner, Aaron Aities, immediately took their cameras to Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan and started filming. The filmmaker duo soon put out an open call for collaborators from across the nation because they wanted to document and mirror the diffuse, decentralized movement as it happened. And everyone was welcome to send in their footage. The result is 99% — The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film, a documentary that will open the 2014 Urban Nomad Film Fest (城市游牧影展) tomorrow at Taipei’s LUX Cinema (樂聲影城) in Ximending.
Photo Courtesy of Urban Nomad Film Fest
STILL WANDERING
Now in its 13th year, Urban Nomad has put together an exciting lineup of 23 feature-length fictional and documentary works from Taiwan, Indonesia, Germany, Canada and the US, as well as a competition for Taiwanese short films.
For those interested in this year’s Urban Nomad, the annual festival, as always, has brought some of the most hilarious and thought-provoking indie films to Taiwan that cover topics ranging from art, music and youth subcultures to activism and social justice. Music fans may want to check out The Punk Singer, a documentary about riot grrrl icon Kathleen Hanna, and Ewell’s and Aites’ Until the Light Takes Us, which looks into the Scandinavian death metal scene. Murder of Couriers is aimed at fixie riders, while A Skate Man (滑板人) focuses on a skateboarder in Kenting (墾丁) in Pingtung county and his ambitious undertaking to break a Guinness World Record for long-distance skateboarding.
Photo Courtesy of Urban Nomad Film Fest
David Frazier, the film festival’s co-founder (and regular Taipei Times contributor), says that the protests on which the collaborative documentary is based will resonate with many in Taiwan because it tackles similar issues as the ongoing Sunflower movement — issues, he says, that date back to 2008 when Chen Yunlin (陳雲林), then chairman of the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, made a controversial visit to Taiwan.
At the time, Urban Nomad was participating in the Taipei Biennial, when “bloody fights” broke out between police and those protesting Chen’s visit.
“All the artists in the biennial saw the photos, and they were shocked because they suddenly realized there was a huge gap between their sort of European-style of protest against capitalism and the actual issue in Taiwan that Taiwanese people are concerned with … The focus on the Occupy [movement] at this year’s Urban Nomad is a continuation of that theme,” Frazier says.
Photo Courtesy of Urban Nomad Film Fest
“For me, the question is: what is the connection between the two events [Occupy Wall Street and the Sunflower movement]? Or is there any meaningful connection of what we can learn from each other?” he asks.
MULTITUDE OF VOICES
With nearly 100 collaborators on 99% and a total of 18 terabytes of footage, the project is an eloquently narrated melange that fuses on-the-scene footage from Occupy rallies in New York, Los Angeles, Oakland, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and many other cities with interviews with activists, academics and cultural commentators.
The documentary includes a multitude of viewpoints and perspectives which cover important themes such as income inequality, the extravagant cost of post-secondary education and concerns over the use of excessive force by police. Equally powerful is the exploration of personal stories, including that of a victim of the subprime mortgage crisis and a retired police captain who shows his support for the movement by submitting to arrest in New York.
“I’m a filmmaker. I tell stories. I’m often drawn to people who think they can change the world. I’m liberal, and I try to be moral, but aesthetics and textures and ideas are also a huge concern for me. I don’t so much want to put forth an agenda with my films, as I want to turn an idea around and show [it from] different angles. However I do feel a tremendous responsibility to truth. Not ‘the truth,’ but truth as a guiding principle.”
HEIRARCHY AND COLLABORATION
For these filmmakers, getting closer to whatever the truth is involves an experimental, consensus-building process of filmmaking that is both non-hierarchical and democratic. But that doesn’t mean that everyone has a part in the decision-making. Ewell says a provisional outline for the documentary was established, along with a centralized organizational system through which the filmmaker duo managed to work intensively with a number of people.
The film credits include four directors, six co-directors, some 60 people filming, six editors, a lead co-editor, three assistant editors, a supervising editor and a post-production supervisor.
“In our case, it was the experience we brought to the film that allowed us to provide structure for all the other filmmakers and collaborators. They felt safe putting their time and effort into something that was being managed by people who knew what they were doing. That allowed everyone to collaborate as much or as little as they wanted, while still knowing that the project was being steered forward,” Ewell says.
Interestingly, the tension between the horizontal power structure and the goal-oriented undertaking becomes a theme in the film itself, as people argue that the movement’s horizontal structure prevents it from making a practical impact and merely satisfies itself with raising awareness — a similar conflict that can be found in Taiwan’s Sunflower movement, where many protestors feel that decision-making was limited to a handful of central leaders.
Ewell says it is important to represent different points of view in the film instead of imposing value on one perspective or the other.
“If you ask 10 people in the Occupy movement what it was about, you will get 20 different answers. But that refusal to limit or define themselves is part of what it is about, and that is what makes it hard for outsiders to understand … Occupy wasn’t just rejecting the goals or priorities of the mainstream; they were rejecting the processes and philosophy: the narrative.”
THE BIGGER PICTURE
Frazier says the advances in technology have facilitated significant development in documentary filmmaking over the past 20 years, which has become diverse and individualized. He adds that the 99% movement creates an “objective platform” that makes communication and mutual understanding possible. It is the same with music movies, for example, which are mostly made for fans, Frazier says.
“In one sense, it’s great we can serve specific communities very well. It makes the festival really fun. But … what’s [our] responsibility to tell a bigger story of what’s happening in the world?”
The makers of 99% fill in that gap by narrating what they believe to be a truthful portrait of the present moment.
“The fact that we are filmmakers and not activists helped us step back and look at things from a storytelling perspective, and I have tremendous faith in the power of narrative. We knew that the story we told would … shape the understanding that many people have of this historical uprising. And that’s the feedback that we’ve received: that people get it,” Ewell says.
Ewell and Aites will hold a panel discussion on Sunday. They will be joined by Lee Jia-hua (李家驊), a local filmmaker who is currently working on a collaborative documentary project for the Sunflower movement, and Steve Brown, whose ongoing project, Occupy the Farm, tells of post-Occupy Wall Street movements in San Francisco. Brown will also attend question-and-answer sessions for Spark: A Burning Man Story, which looks into the 28-year history of the arts festival/giant party in the Nevada desert and the challenges it faces.
Having taken 99% around the world, Ewell and Aites have also taken the chance to converse with different people and discussed questions such as was Occupy effective? What worked? What didn’t? And where do activists go next? Ewell says they look forward to their visit in Taipei to learn about local strategies.
“In a world where most people go about their lives wishing things were different, some people do more than wish. They take action. That’s exciting. And I don’t fault the experimental. How else can we evolve if we don’t try new ways of doing things?” she says.
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