** this event is being presented in conunction with Burning Books **
In 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, acclaimed filmmaker Iara Lee embarked on a journey to better understand a world increasingly embroiled in conflict and, as she saw it, heading for self-destruction. After several years, traveling over five continents, Iara encountered growing numbers of people who committed their lives to promoting change. From Iran, where graffiti and rap became tools in fighting government repression, moving on to Brazil, where musicians reach out to slum kids and transform guns into guitars, and ending in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, where photography, music, and film have given a voice to those rarely heard, CULTURES OF RESISTANCE explores how art and creativity can be ammunition in the battle for peace and justice.
The screening will have a guest Skype appearance by Arthur Philips, a representative of the Cultures of Resistance Foundation. This event is funded in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
CULTURES OF RESISTANCE began conceptually 10 years ago. I had always been enveloped in film, music, arts and culture, and how they all intersect, but with this project I had a particular interest in how art could be used to express opposition to injustice. In 2000, I spent time in Afghan refugee camps in Peshawar/Pakistan where I interviewed women who had suffered under the gender apartheid of Taliban rule. Out of these interviews came a short film, which I hoped would raise awareness about an issue that had largely been hidden from Western audiences. I hoped my modest contribution would spur a few people to action.
Years later, in 2003, during the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, I decided to travel to and live in the Middle East as a way to better understand a region that is so plagued by conflict in this supposedly peaceful age. It was during this period—in 2006—that I was living in Lebanon and experienced firsthand the Israeli military’s bombardment of that country. Having lived in a world that so infrequently makes any notice of the causes of human suffering in that region, I was deeply saddened and appalled by the reckless violence I saw. This experience forever cemented my commitment to social justice—in particular to creative resistance.
During this time I did not yet have a clear vision of what would come of all these experiences. But I was constantly meeting inspiring individuals who, despite living in poverty, conflict, or extreme disadvantage, held out hope for a better world. And those people who made the greatest impact did not rest on their hope as a way of coping with the present. The bravest people used it as motivation for taking action to make our world a fairer one.
From these people I have learned so much and have drawn much of my personal strength. They helped me realize that a film could hold the power not just to document the injustices that other people are suffering; they taught me that a film could also be an example of how regular people are standing up to the world’s most powerful interests everyday. That those featured in the film are mostly artists of one form or another, committed to nonviolent resistance, makes their stories all the more inspiring. -- Iara Lee
About the Director, Iara Lee:
Iara Lee, a Brazilian of Korean descent, is an activist, filmmaker, and founder of the Caipirinha Foundation, which supports projects to secure peace with justice. Iara is currently working on a variety of initiatives, grouped under the umbrella of CULTURES OF RESISTANCE, an activist network that brings together artists and changemakers from around the world.
As an activist, Iara has collaborated with numerous grassroots efforts, including the International Campaign to Ban Cluster Munitions, the Conflict Zone Film Fund, and the New York Philharmonic's groundbreaking 2008 concert in North Korea.
From 1984 to 1989 Iara was the producer of the Sao Paulo International Film Festival. In 1989 she moved to New York City, where she founded the mixed-media company Caipirinha Productions to explore the synergy of different art forms (such as film, music, architecture, and poetry). Under the banner of Caipirinha Productions, Iara has directed short and feature-length documentaries including SYNTHETIC PLEASURES, MODULATIONS, ARCHITETTURA and BENEATH THE BORQA. She has also organized lectures, photo exhibits, and fundraising events related to these initiatives.
Iara Lee is a member of the President's Council of The International Crisis Group (ICG) and the Council of Advisors of the National Geographic Society, as well as a trustee to the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), North Korea's first and only university whose faculty will be entirely composed of international professors.
ABOUT THE PEOPLE IN THE FILM
CULTURES OF RESISTANCE does not focus on one place in the world where a military unit or private corporation is violating a group of people’s human rights. Instead, the film looks at conflicts all over the world and seeks out artists who devote their work to fighting injustice and violence.
POETS FOR PEACE
Medellín, Colombia, a city once notorious for drug violence, is reinventing itself as a world center for the living word. We attend the Medellín International Poetry Festival, which has been instrumental to this transformation by bringing the work of poets committed to promoting peace and social justice to the wider public. Founded in 1991, when the streets of Medellín were at their worst, organizers envisioned the festival as a form of artistic resistance against injustice and terrorism at the hands of drug cartels and the military. Over the years the festival has brought 1,000 poets from over 140 countries to Colombia and in 2006 received a Right Livelihood Award, widely known as "The Alternative Nobel Peace Prize.
IRANIAN GRAFFITI ARTISTS
In Iran we encounter citizens who are at once patriotic—in rejecting heavy-handed threats from the U.S.—and critical of their own government—taking personal risks to demand greater political freedoms. Among these are the so-called Tehran Rats, a group of graffiti artists that under the cover of night expresses its dissent with spray-paint on city walls. As one of their members says, “good art is something that moves and shakes you.”
RWANDAN WOMEN LEADERSHIP
In Rwanda, where a greater proportion of women serve in the legislature than in any other country, we meet Hutu women who risked their lives to protect Tutsi children during the country’s 1994 genocide. One survivor, standing next to the rescuer who put herself in danger to help him, describes his experience: “She took me into the house and suggested that I hide up in the roof,” the survivor says. “I came out after three months, together with this brave woman.”
LIBERIAN CARTOONIST
In Liberia we encounter Leslie Lumeh, a survivor of his country’s civil war in the 1990s, who has since made sketches to recreate scenes from the conflict. Lumeh’s work was featured in a short documentary that aired on a local television station in Monrovia, which provoked then-president Charles Taylor to force the artist and his family into exile. Since his return home in 2005, his work has been widely welcomed and he continues to draw and paint to encourage ongoing peace in Liberia.
BRAZILIAN FAVELA PHOTOGRAPHER
Artists and community organizers work to stem violence in one of the most turbulent urban spaces in the world: the slums of Rio De Janeiro. One of them is photographer Andre Cypriano, whose startling images document the existence of those who persevere to build peaceful lives amid widespread poverty and despair. “These communities are where the violence exists,” Cypriano tells us. “But why? Through my photos I try to show where the problem is, where the solution is.”
LEBANON’S REFUGEE FILMMAKERS
In Lebanon we meet filmmakers who are devoted to offering their craft to those trapped within the walls of refugee camps. By giving the art of film to members of these communities, they are providing the tools to make visible what life is like for Palestinian refugees. As one member of the Zakira Photo Project says, “When you give them the camera, they feel a responsibility to document the community, so you are empowering them.”
POLITICAL PRANKSTERS
The Yes Men are about as skilled as it gets in the art of deception. They first garnered international attention when one of them posed as a spokesperson for Dow Chemical on live television to make an announcement that would temporarily cause the company’s stock value to fall by over $1 billion. Since then, they have continued to pull off outrageous stunts, including the distribution of a special edition of The New York Times. The fake newspaper announced the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other improbable news, and asked its readers to think deeply about the state of our world.
INDIGENOUS ACTIVISTS
We travel to the Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon, where the Brazilian government has for decades pushed for the construction of the so-called Belo Monte dam. If built, it would be the world’s third largest dam and would displace many thousands of the region’s residents. During our visit we encountered an uprising of over 1,000 people from various indigenous communities who were joined by national and international supporters to express their unequivocal opposition to the project. Today, their resistance remains as unified as ever.
ISRAELI DISSIDENTS
The Israel/Palestine conflict often gets reduced to worn-out accusations and talking points, and in the process loses sight of the real human suffering that comes as its result. Jeff Halper, an Israeli citizen who has become a vocal opponent of many of his government’s policies, is one member of a surprisingly vibrant community that condemns its government’s policies toward the Palestinian people.
HIP-HOP ARTISTS FROM PALESTINE
Palestinian hip-hop group Katibe 5 carries on a tradition of socially conscious rap, even as the genre becomes increasingly commercialized in the U.S. The group is made up of five members who came of age together inside the walls of a refugee camp in Beirut where over 16,000 people reside in less than a square mile. While the plight of the Palestinian people is a central focus of their work, they rap in solidarity with other struggles around the world. As one member put it, “We're not just Palestinian refugees speaking about our problems, or our lives in the camps, because the problems we face are not only a Palestinian problem. All over the world there are people who are oppressed, people who are incarcerated, people who are suffering."
This is only a handful of the inspiring artists who appear in the movie. You can see them and many more perform their music and explain what motivates their work in CULTURES OF RESISTANCE.
About Cultures of Resistance (the organization):
Worldwide, people from all walks of life are finding creative ways to oppose war and promote peace, justice, and sustainability. Culture—including film, music, and food—is fertile terrain for this struggle. Education that nourishes a critical mind and fortifies the soul is just as essential. Cultures of Resistance (CoR) is an international activist network established to identify and support diverse efforts that embody these values.
CoR is comprised of a family of initiatives, including a film production company, an outreach website, and a feature-length documentary. Together, these initiatives work to sustain a far-reaching collection of activists and agitators, educators and artists, insurgent musicians, vanguard gardeners, gourmands, and guerilla filmmakers.
ABOUT CAIPIRINHA PRODUCTIONS & CAIPIRINHA FOUNDATION
Caipirinha Productions, Inc. is an independent mixed media arts & culture company with activities in the fields of film, music, and human rights. Caipirinha produced and distributed the documentary films MODULATIONS and SYNTHETIC PLEASURES, among other short and feature-length films.
Caipirinha Foundation was established as an operating foundation whose official mission is to conduct and support public educational activities related to human rights, international law, United States foreign policy, independent media, and arts & culture.
What is Cultures of Resistance (CoR)?
Worldwide, people from all walks of life are finding creative ways to oppose war and promote peace, justice, and sustainability. Culture—including film, music, and food—is fertile terrain for this struggle. Education that nourishes a critical mind and fortifies the soul is just as essential. Cultures of Resistance (CoR) is an international activist network established to identify and support diverse efforts that embody these values.
CoR is comprised of a family of initiatives, including a film production company, an outreach website, and a feature-length documentary. Together, these initiatives work to sustain a far-reaching collection of activists and agitators, educators and artists, insurgent musicians, vanguard gardeners, gourmands, and guerilla filmmakers.
CoR's Project Areas
The Cultures of Resistance outreach website provides a hub for the network's activities. Here, CoR promotes both urgent responses to humanitarian crises and long-term campaigns for social change. Our campaigns fall into four primary project areas. Through Make Films, Not War, we collaborate with artists who are unleashing the power of the moving image. Make Music, Not War promotes the use of music as a cultural bridge for understanding and peace. Make Food, Not War strives to make connections between the cultural richness of cuisine to pressing issues of aid, trade, and sustainable living. Finally, Education, Not War aims to highlight educational opportunities for under-served students of all ages. CoR channels its efforts through these four central areas, which reflect the network’s most basic beliefs and mission.
Make Films, Not War
One of the most powerful mediums of our time, film continues to be an influential tool for opposing war and promoting peace. CoR’s Make Films Not War project area highlights how film has given a voice to excluded, impoverished, and oppressed populations and communities. One example of this project area’s work is the short film “The Battle for the Xingu” which documents an indigenous community’s struggle to preserve their cultural traditions and natural habitat. The film captures the Kayapó people of the Brazilian Amazon during their 2008 Altamira summit, when 1,000 indigenous activists joined international supporters to protest the proposed Belo Monte Dam, a mega-project that an earlier generation of activists had successfully shut down decades before. Another notable initiative of Make Films, Not War is its support for National Geographic’s All Roads Film Project, which provides a platform for underrepresented peoples to tell their historical and cultural experiences in their own voices. The project, which has received support from CoR’s allied foundations since 2004, has provided an array of seed grants to indigenous groups to make films. These have been screened at various festivals around the world. One example is a film that follows a folk singer searching for a lost verse from a traditional Mongolian song; another explores women’s struggles for liberation in Afghanistan; a third documents the impact of mass emigration from Oaxaca, Mexico.
Make Music, Not War
Music is not only a powerful means of aesthetic expression, but also a form of dialogue through which citizens participate in public life. CoR’s Make Music Not War project area emphasizes music’s ability to transcend geographic, political, and cultural borders and convey shared human experience. One example of the work we promote was the New York Philharmonic's groundbreaking 2008 concert in Pyongyang, North Korea. Before this performance no American artists of any kind had performed there, and the concert was recognized as a landmark instance of citizen diplomacy. CoR has collaborated with artists to produce music videos, as in a partnership with Iranian rapper Hichkas. CoR helped the artist produce the song and music video “Bunch of Soldiers,” which takes a closer look at one of the youth countercultures in Iran today. To date this video has been viewed on YouTube over 160,000 times.
Make Food, Not War
CoR recognizes that environmental sustainability and food security are essential parts of building lasting peace. Its Make Food, Not War project area is dedicated to raising awareness about urgent food-related concerns and how communities have responded to these challenges. Current urgent concerns include the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which left thousands of Gazans without adequate food or clean water, making the fight against hunger and malnutrition a daily battle. CoR has promoted a number of groups working to secure food for some of the hundreds of thousands in Gaza who cannot procure a healthy diet due to import restrictions and a severely damaged agricultural economy. These groups have established food-for-work programs, trained educators to teach their students proper nutrition, and donated chickens as seed grants. Other significant CoR food campaigns include working towards improving wages and working conditions for agricultural workers, increasing international awareness of marginalized food producers, and changing the rules of conventional international trade.
Education, Not War
Education is essential to combating ignorance, inequality, and injustice. CoR’s Education Not War project area is dedicated to increasing the educational opportunities available to the world’s under-served. CoR has highlighted the work of organizations such as The Zinn Education Project, which carries on Howard Zinn’s legacy of teaching an inclusive “history from below.” The Zinn Education Project's website makes field-tested, interactive classroom lessons available to teachers at no cost, and it is the only collection of its kind for educators – print or online — in the United States. Another example is our promotion for Aïna, which for nearly a decade has initiated education programs, facilitated the development of local media production, and supported the enhancement of large-scale communication in Afghanistan. Aïna aims to close the technological gap between the world’s rich and poor by offering Afghans comprehensive video, photography, and journalism training in the interests of nurturing the roots of peace, freedom, and democracy.
Getting Involved
In addition to highlighting projects that are working on an on-going basis to promote peace with justice, CoR responds to urgent crises and encourages visitors to get involved. On the CoR home page, we often highlight a timely issue that requires public response. In recent years, we have encouraged visitors to take action to break the siege of Gaza, to stop the U.S. government from bombing Iran, or to stand in solidarity with groups such as Friends of the Congo.
Beyond urgent action, we highlight life-changing opportunities for volunteering with cutting-edge groups identified by the CoR network. In the spirit of its slogan, “Be the change you want to see," CoR has forged bonds with a broad array of innovative organizers in order to recommend creative, meaningful ways to join the fight for peace and justice. Visitors to CoR’s “Get Involved” page can go beyond signing a petition or writing a letter to an elected representative and can instead find engaging and often challenging opportunities to make a serious commitment to a cause of their choice. One example is to join with the Guatemala Accompaniment Project, which recruits and trains American citizens to accompany community leaders and human rights activists in Guatemala who have been targeted for repression because of their work. Other opportunities include joining with others to pack shipments of supplies to be sent to civilians caught in active conflict zones, interning with lawyers fighting for international environmental justice, or becoming a local leader in campaigns to raise awareness about contemporary slavery.
Conclusion
Humanity is at a critical juncture. Rapid advancements in technology—including ever-more-menacing weapons of war and tools of hyper-consumption—have lured us toward self-destruction. At the same time, advances in global media and telecommunications have made us more conscious than ever of our connections to people around the world. Today, we can act and react in ways never before imagined. Now more than ever each individual, making his or her own creative contribution, can make a difference. Cultures of Resistance seeks to show that—to paraphrase activist Marian Wright Edelman—democracy is not a spectator sport. It is our responsibility to realize our potential and create positive change.
This event is funded in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.
