 |
Synopsis
|
||||||||||||
|
November 30, 1999: The world's attention is focused on Seattle as tens of thousands of protesters successfully block the opening meetings of the World Trade Organization trade talks. The city's downtown is awash in clouds of teargas, WTO delegates are bewildered, negotiations break down and the world's media suddenly discover an unheralded political movement. On the other side of the continent, a crowd of 800 is crammed into a nightclub for an unusual film opening on Montreal's trendy Boulevard St-Laurent. On the street outside, 500 people have already been turned away. It's a heady debut for a 45-minute documentary on political activism by three local filmmakers. One of the "stars" of the film, local protest organizer Philippe Duhamel, is 5,000 kilometres and three time zones away, but puts in an appearance via cellphone, his words piped over the sound system of the club. "The City of Seattle has just declared a state of emergency," he reports from the midst of the protest, as the Montreal crowd erupts in cheering. The Seattle demonstrations may have been the debutante's ball in a new season of international activism. But this resurgence of political protest, directed against the triumphalism of free market capitalism as codified by the WTO and other international trade deals, had been growing, building coalitions and winning victories long before it reached critical mass in Seattle. Pressure Point; Inside the Montreal Blockade documents how that activism developed and what motivates today's protesters to engage in civil disobedience of the type that shut down the WTO and threatens to disrupt negotiations for a Free Trade Area of the Americas in Quebec City this spring. In the spring of 1998, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment was little known and even less understood. As negotiated in secret at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a grouping of the world's 29 leading economies, the MAI would have drastically limited democratic sovereignty in the name of international investors, "rights." After a draft copy was leaked and posted on the Internet, however, activists the world over began to organize and coordinate their opposition, particularly in France and Canada. Pressure Point chronicles one of the key actions in the campaign that eventually helped scuttle the MAI in late 1998; a blockade of a Montreal hotel playing host to a conference featuring many of the politically powerful actors behind the proposed accord. As a political and personal document, however, the film provides a rare portrait of the training, strategizing and intense decision-making processes that drive the new activism. Today's protest groups are characterized by their willingness to risk arrest and physical violence on the part of security forces. While pro-free trade commentators dismiss this resistance as an inchoate and misplaced rage on behalf of outmoded economic systems, Pressure Point goes behind the clichés and sneering putdowns. As Duhamel says early in the film during a pre-protest training session, "We're putting our bodies and our hearts on the line. We're taking great personal risks." The same could be said for the three producers of the film. Only 10 days before the protest, veteran documentary filmmaker Magnus Isacsson had no funding, television deal, crew or film plan. He was busy with other projects. He had no time. But the instinct that this would be a crucial political event wouldn't go away. So Isacsson contacted Malcolm Guy, an experienced documentary producer with his own production company, Multi-Monde, and Anna Paskal, a young producer and author who was close to the activists in the newly formed protest group dubbed Opération SalAMI. Together, the three sat down, drew up a plan, arranged for film crews to work on the promise of later payment, and set to work. As Guy notes in true DIY style, "Our attitude at the beginning was, 'We'll make this film whatever happens.'" Isacsson's idea was to focus on people new to this style of street politics. After circulating a questionnaire to the participants in SalAMI's training sessions, they settled on four political neophytes, each with their own reasons for getting involved in the battle but who share a passion for social justice. It was a good wager. Sébastien Bouchard, Freya Mackenzie, Vivianne White and Linda Hanna are fresh and engaging, unencumbered by the dry political rhetoric that too often accompanies years of involvement in political struggle. The four share their innermost fears and motivations, and reveal the contradictions that complicate the emotional and intellectual calculations that will put themselves in the path of heavily armed riot police. "I think people reach a point where they have to do something, where physically they can't rationalize staying home when they know there is a struggle they strongly believe in," Anna Paskal observes. At first blush, Linda Hanna doesn't fit the typical profile of a street activist. An immigrant from Egypt, she works as the editor-in-chief of L'Hirondelle, the newspaper of the Quebec Women's Network. As her boyfriend notes in an effort to dissuade her from taking part in the blockade, she already has a public voice and a position of respect, a social standing that he feels could be threatened by undue attention from the police and the courts. If street protest is a way of giving voice to the voiceless, Hanna doesn't appear to belong, and it shows in her agonizing struggle over whether to risk arrest in the blockade. "I think the best counsellor is the little voice inside us," she says at one point in the film. "I'll try to consult it... listen to it. The little voice wants to go. But it's telling me to think about it some more." Hanna is torn between the advice of her boyfriend and the subtle but intoxicating peer pressure of the group. Yet in the end, her deepest motivations go far beyond personal concerns. "Women are waging battles throughout the Middle East," Hanna explains. "These women are sometimes stoned to death. They have their throats cut. They are called all sorts of names to try to discredit their movement. Here we have the opportunity to mobilize, to be recognized for our actions in women's groups. So I tell myself it's a duty for me to show solidarity and do my part, even if it's not on a grand scale." At 50 years old, Vivianne White is older than most of her fellow protesters. White admits she hopes not to get arrested or pepper-sprayed in her first taste of civil disobedience that she is experiencing with her daughter, Freya. Like Hanna, however, there is a mature understanding of the necessity of citizen action over an issue that reduces citizenship to a simple matter of consumerism. "The point of all this is to play to the media to some extent; to make a splash and raise people's awareness," White says as the protesters march to the scene of the confrontation to come. "Words are nice, but when you see people laying their bodies on the line it's impressive." To the filmmakers, relief, the two women provided the honest insights and revealing inner conflict he had hoped for. For years, Isacsson has documented political causes, filming environmental conflicts, native struggles and labour strife. "One of my concerns in doing this was that a lot of activist films all feel the same because they focus on the same placard-waving, sloganeering, activist people," Isacsson says. "People get tired of that because after five minutes of the film they know what people have to say. But people can identify with neophytes. It gives a fraicheur to the experience that makes it more interesting." Indeed, audiences who screen the film are invariably moved by the characters as the tension builds and people they have come to know in the space of 52 minutes run the gamut of emotions. SalAMI's Duhamel has shown the film to upwards of 40 different groups over the past year, ranging in size from a couple dozen to several hundred. During activist training camps, he says, the first day is spent reviewing the FTAA and related globalization issues, and participants tend to get depressed and discouraged. "They are just so surprised at how far (the trade deals) go," Duhamel says. "So we use the movie at night after dinner when people are burnt out anyway from the whole day of workshops. And it just lights them up. It really sets up the actual training on the following day." For his organizing work, Duhamel says Pressure Point "is like a gift from the sky. It's very effective and powerful." He recounts his experience showing the film to groups of nuns, and discovering another side to how a seemingly unlikely audience can identify with profound urges for fairness and justice. "The film connects with the spiritual inkling," Duhamel explains. "To me it's always been more of a strategic tool. But I've been discovering what I call the ethics garden. People see a way they can be politically effective, while remaining true to their beliefs and showing respect for all life. That connects with them. People can be non-violent and yet assertive, even aggressive. It reminds them of Oscar Romero, and it works." It wouldn't have worked at all without a timely piece of funding that arrived months after filming wrapped up. Without a broadcast license, normal financing sources are wary of putting money up front. And until the US-based Solidago Foundation provided some seed money, Pressure Point was in danger of having an audience of three. The grant paid for a six-minute video that Isacsson, Guy and Paskal used to apply for more funding. The Canada Council for the Arts then came on board, followed by a broadcast agreement with Télé-Québec, by then a year after the SalAMI action. The broadcast license then opened doors at Sodec, Quebec's publicly funded cultural foundation. The long months of beating the bushes for funding was a blessing in disguise, says Isacsson. "In some ways we were incredibly lucky with this film," he admits. "First of all, because the MAI was defeated, we ended up with a document that showed how that was achieved. A film on a political victory travels a lot better than one on yet another noble defeat." By that time, political activists were en route to Seattle from all over North America. "It was perfect timing. So in fact it was a good thing we didn't get the money right away. We finished it two or three weeks before the WTO meeting, and our first screening was in Seattle." Paskal and Guy chaperoned the film to its coming-out at Seattle's Independent Media Center five days before the WTO negotiations on a "Millennium" trade round was set to begin. The atmosphere was electric, says Paskal, and the reaction to the film was beyond their expectations. Paskal shares a passage from her diary: "The reaction to the film was completely fabulous," she writes in a passage dated Nov. 25, 1999. "They laughed, cheered, booed and hissed through the whole thing. When the lights went up, there were tons of questions: What do we do to stop cops from hurting us? Why didn't you guys lock yourselves together to make arrests harder? The mood was bursting with imaginings of actions in the days to come. Many people came up to us afterwards wanting to show the film in their hometown." The networking led to a marketing deal with Free Speech TV, which supplies progressive programming to 30 community stations in the United States. Pressure Point is now featured prominently on the organization's website. Many other activist groups, such as the Direct Action Network, purchased copies for their own awareness-raising work in communities across the U.S. The film was also broadcast nationally in Canada on CBC Newsworld. The success Pressure Point has enjoyed is tempered, however, by some activists' criticisms that the film doesn't adequately address the myriad democratic issues raised by the MAI, and by globalization more generally. It's a problem the three producers wrestled with for months. The proposed deal was a long and arcane piece of trade legalese, with so many far-reaching implications that a three-hour epic would have had difficulty in doing the issue justice. During the months of working over the treatment in the cutting room, in fact, they actually experimented with several different endings that attempted to explain the investor's pact in greater detail. "In the end," says Paskal, "we decided that would really weigh it down. And in retrospect, it would have dated the film; now it's transferable to all these other campaigns." For his part, Guy says the film is more of an examination of activism and the people involved in it. "If it inspires people, they will go and learn more about the issue," he argues. "I think film is not a particularly good medium for passing along hard information, raw data figures and facts. Emotions, yes. And if you can get people emotionally involved, they'll go and read the material; they'll find out more about the MAI." Filmmaking style is also a very individual, subjective matter, Isacsson adds. "You know, a film is a film. And a movie, if it's going to work, has to have a dramatic structure. It has to have some sense of conflict, suspense, character development and all those ingredients that make a good film. In doing so, you're lead to the contradictions inherent in the movement. Which everyone isn't always comfortable with, but you're left with a much more realistic portrayal." These are debates that will always dog filmmakers who are openly sympathetic to their subject, but feel a responsibility to remain true to their craft. Nonetheless, the Pressure Point style has many points of convergence with the organizing tactics of the camera's subject. The low-cost, independent status of the filmmakers forces them into mirroring some of the activists' methods, by dividing into mobile teams with independent decision-making powers much like the horizontally organized "affinity groups" operate. "It's partly for the same reason that activists form affinity groups; you can't coordinate this kind of thing," says Isacsson. "It is totally unpredictable, you don't know where things are going, and the only solution is for the crews to follow certain characters."The style is known as cinema verité, he adds, and it's the modus operandi Isacsson will be taking to Quebec City for his next project examining the protests planned for the Summit of the Americas. Only this time, the funding is in place and the details have been worked out. "There will be more directors and more crews using hand-held, mobile cameras," Isacsson explains. "They will follow multiple characters and try to talk to them in action more than in a sit-down setting." The style will serve them well for
the epic clash of world views the FTAA has sparked. As Philippe
Duhamel notes near the end of Pressure Point, the MAI will inevitably
surface in other forms, and other fora. "SalAMI is only
the beginning," he said in 1998. The words were prophetic;
despite the secrecy shrouding the FTAA negotiations, details
leaking out of the process point to a resurrection of some of
the more anti-democratic aspects of the hydra-headed investors'
pact that was pronounced dead, perhaps prematurely, more than
two years ago. That prospect demonstrates the absolute necessity
for image-makers who can portray this socio-political phenomenon
in all of its complexity. "We're in a society in crisis,"
Isacsson states. "We're in a society where our resources
are threatened, our economy is threatened, our futures are threatened.
And if we want to preserve any of that for future generations,
we better get involved. Our films are documents of people getting
involved, struggling for their rights and a better world." |
|
|||||||||
