Can films change the world?

Peo­ple are fear­ful of change. We seek reas­sur­ance in famil­iar­i­ty. We don’t want to feel the weight of a world tar­nished by mur­der and rape and abuse and trau­ma on our shoul­ders. If there is hope for human­i­ty then it will be through a chain of incre­men­tal lifestyle upgrades. These pro­mo­tions tend to hap­pen through encoun­ters with peo­ple that inspire us through their exam­ple. For me, these peo­ple are sto­ry­tellers – usu­al­ly filmmakers.

I don’t believe that all films take place in an escapist bub­ble float­ing above the tan­gi­ble world. Seri­ous, bold and tal­ent­ed doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ers are alchemists that turn the data-dri­ven reports of the glob­al news agen­da into human sto­ries with roots in the exist­ing pow­er struc­tures of the world.

Joshua Oppen­heimer has made it his busi­ness to talk to and under­stand the com­plex­es of men who have per­pe­trat­ed geno­cide. At a Q&A fol­low­ing a screen­ing of The Look of Silence, an audi­ence mem­ber asked if he was close to under­stand­ing how men jus­ti­fy their bru­tal actions. An excerpt from his response: ​“Fright­en­ing­ly, all of us know how peo­ple do this. We all have been involved with groups that are doing some­thing that we all feel a bit uncom­fort­able with indi­vid­u­al­ly. We all know what it’s like to feel, ​‘Well, if the group is doing this, par­tic­u­lar­ly with the bless­ings of author­i­ty, it must be okay.’ That sus­pen­sion of indi­vid­ual moral­i­ty when we join a group, the lack of think­ing crit­i­cal­ly, is a big part of it.”

We are not indi­vid­u­als inde­pen­dent of soci­ety. Intel­li­gent progress depends upon find­ing a moral­ly sound group to belong to, be that lit­er­al mem­ber­ship or spir­i­tu­al fra­ter­ni­ty. To run with Oppenheimer’s log­ic in the oth­er direc­tion: we need sup­port. Among the guid­ing lights that uplift my think­ing are the direc­tors Mah­di Fleifel, Kim Longinot­to and Joshua Oppen­heimer. The films they make are very dif­fer­ent, but each lets the gen­tle breeze of com­pas­sion rip­ple through sub­jects that would ren­der many stac­ca­to with anger.

Mah­di Fleifel’s A World Not Ours finds anec­do­tal charm and won­der­ful char­ac­ters among his fam­i­ly in a Pales­tin­ian refugee camp in Lebanon, let­ting the long­ing for home emerge qui­et­ly amid the rhythms of dai­ly life. Kim Longinotto’s MO is to find female abuse sur­vivors and tell their sto­ries – Dream­catch­er is an absorb­ing cross-sec­tion of pros­ti­tu­tion anchored by the out­reach activ­i­ties of a saint­ly and charis­mat­ic for­mer sex work­er named Bren­da Myers-Powell.

The Look of Silence con­tin­ues what Joshua Oppen­heimer start­ed with his 2012 film The Act of Killing, depict­ing the lega­cy of the 1965 Indone­sian vio­lent purge of ​‘com­mu­nists’ with sto­ry­telling as emo­tion­al­ly wrench­ing as it is intel­lec­tu­al­ly aspirational.

LWLies spoke to these direc­tors with a view to dis­cov­er­ing how inten­tion­al you have to be to make a film with the pow­er to cre­ate change. I want­ed to know how much active philosophis­ing is nec­es­sary to tran­scend reac­tionary work. I want­ed to feel the per­son­al­i­ties of the direc­tors and glimpse the way that who they are informs what they do. The fol­low­ing inter­views were con­duct­ed in a con­ver­sa­tion­al, unstruc­tured man­ner. The pur­pose of tak­ing short extracts from these lengthy inter­views was to high­light the uni­ver­sal wis­dom that pulsed under our spe­cialised conversations.

LWLies: Can films change the world?

Joshua Oppen­heimer: Instant­ly I want to say that films must change the world in at least some ways or they’re not worth mak­ing. At the very least, even a fic­tion film, even if it has no effect on the par­tic­i­pants – if it has no effect on the par­tic­i­pants then there’s some­thing wrong with it but it should cer­tain­ly take the film­mak­er to a place that she’s nev­er imag­ined pos­si­ble before she began. Ide­al­ly a film, also a non-fic­tion film is trans­for­ma­tive for every­body involved and for the peo­ple who see it and, con­se­quent­ly, for the place where it’s made.

Does a movie actu­al­ly have the pow­er to insti­gate real polit­i­cal change?

Oppen­heimer: Cer­tain­ly but I’ll just say one more abstract thing because I don’t think those two things are sep­a­ra­ble. It’s not like there’s abstract, the­o­ret­i­cal change and then con­crete change. A work of art should func­tion as a mir­ror or maybe even more of a kind of micro­scope or prism that forces us to con­front some of the most mys­te­ri­ous and painful aspects of what we are and in doing so it makes pos­si­ble con­ver­sa­tions which weren’t pos­si­ble before that. So, maybe I believe that a gen­uine work of art is like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes who comes and says, ​‘Look, the king is naked’ Every­body knew it but was too afraid to say it. But hav­ing said it, a whole new con­ver­sa­tion becomes pos­si­ble and that’s dif­fer­ent from activism and dif­fer­ent from jour­nal­ism because it’s not about expos­ing new infor­ma­tion, it’s actu­al­ly about expos­ing what every­body already knew and didn’t want to look at or sus­pect­ed but didn’t want to look at.

How selec­tive should you be about what you’re shooting?

Kim Longinot­to: The kind of films I want to make, Sophie, they’re not about, ​‘Oh isn’t it ter­ri­ble hap­pen­ing over there’ or ​‘Isn’t that excit­ing.’ Every sin­gle time I was film­ing in Dream­catch­er it meant some­thing to me. I’m sure we’ve all had expe­ri­ences of rape. I’ve had expe­ri­ences of rape but if you’ve not had expe­ri­ences of rape, we’ve all had expe­ri­ences of some­thing that made us uncom­fort­able sex­u­al­ly. We’ve all had expe­ri­ences of some kind of vio­lence at some point – well most of us have. We’ve all felt that we are less than oth­er peo­ple. We’ve felt inse­cure and we can look at Bren­da and think, ​‘Look, if she can do it, I can,’ When I feel depressed which is, you know, often I read the news and I look at stuff and I think, ​‘Oh god, it’s all so dread­ful’ and then I think, ​‘Oh, come on, Kim. Don’t be such a wuss. Bren­da. Look at her. She’s still going.’ I think it’s that she admit­ted it was so hard that made it inspir­ing for me. The fact that she’s strug­gling meant some­thing to me.

How do you pre­vent a film from being angry?

Mah­di Fleifel: I think that love is the key. Real­ly. And actu­al­ly try­ing to be imag­i­na­tive enough to put your­self in the oth­er person’s shoes. And try­ing to wish for them what you’d wish for your­self. It’s not an easy thing. You real­ly have to be coura­geous. You real­ly have to be fear­less to be able to embark on that mis­sion. It’s not impos­si­ble. It’s with­in human nature. I’m not talk­ing about any­thing abstract or utopic here. It’s in every human. There’s a choice to do good or bad so being angry is a choice. You can either choose to be com­pas­sion­ate and to love or you can choose to be angry.

Do you iden­ti­fy as a polit­i­cal filmmaker?

Fleifel: I don’t see myself and I would hate to see myself as a polit­i­cal film­mak­er. I’m not real­ly into pol­i­tics. I don’t have any polit­i­cal state­ments or dog­mas that I want to give any­one. I’m inter­est­ed in peo­ple, in feel­ings and in the human soul. I’m not inter­est­ed in pol­i­tics. It always makes me laugh when I hear any politi­cian say any­thing because they’re putting up a façade of dis­hon­esty and just try­ing to sell peo­ple some good words. There’s a lot of sta­tis­tics and facts and this and that and it has real­ly noth­ing to do with the truth of things, with the real­i­ty of things. I’m look­ing for the human face. If you put a cam­era on a human face that has a lot to say then that will say more than any sta­tis­tic or politi­cian or any­thing words can say. Through­out any­thing that I’m try­ing to do, I’m real­ly look­ing for the sim­i­lar­i­ties in peo­ple. It’s so easy to point out the dif­fer­ences in every­one but that’s ego talk­ing. That’s not the truth.

Should you let ide­ol­o­gy moti­vate your filmmaking?

Oppen­heimer: I don’t think that it’s ide­ol­o­gy that’s moti­vat­ing me at all. It’s just human­i­ty, I mean a crime against human­i­ty is a crime against all of us. When I start­ed to film the geno­cide per­pe­tra­tors and found to my hor­ror that it was as though I’d wan­dered into Ger­many 40 years after the Holo­caust only to find the Nazis still in pow­er, I was in my late twen­ties. I had been liv­ing on a plan­ta­tion, help­ing a group of plan­ta­tion work­ers make their own film about their strug­gle to organ­ise a union. I dis­cov­ered that they were afraid to con­front their boss­es over the use of a her­bi­cide that was killing them, that was actu­al­ly destroy­ing their liv­ers and killing the women who were tasked with spray­ing. I dis­cov­ered that their source of that fear was that their par­ents and grand­par­ents had been killed for being in a union in 1965 and the per­pe­tra­tors were still in pow­er and they were afraid that this could hap­pen to them again. I felt, ​‘If this is equiv­a­lent to Nazis hav­ing won World War Two I had bet­ter stop every­thing else I’m doing’ – and I had a num­ber of projects I was pur­su­ing at the time – and give this as many years of my life as it took to expose this mech­a­nism of fear in the hope that some­how in doing so the mech­a­nism would cease to func­tion as smoothly.

Do you think any­thing hap­pens to social under­dogs as a result of telling their sto­ries on film?

Longinot­to: We’re going to screen Dream­catch­er and the peo­ple in it will see. They’ll be big on the screen and they’ll be heroes and they’ll be sur­vivors and it’ll change their lives. I know it will because it hap­pens every time. They won’t think of them­selves as vic­tims any more, if they ever have done. The lit­tle girl, Fouzia, who is the main char­ac­ter in my film The Day I Will Nev­er For­get who calls her moth­er to account for cir­cum­cis­ing her, saved it from hap­pen­ing to her lit­tle sis­ter. She’s now in the States study­ing to be a doc­tor. It changed her life because she was heard. She wrote a poem against her par­ents and had nev­er dared read it to them. The actu­al poem she wrote ends, ​‘I’m ask­ing you, my lov­ing par­ents, is this what I real­ly deserve?’ then, when I was film­ing her, she changed it to ​‘I’m ask­ing you, my lov­ing par­ents, is this what I real­ly deserve? I’m ask­ing all of you,’ and she’s look­ing into the cam­era, ​‘Is this is what I real­ly deserve?” I said Fouzia that end­ing was fan­tas­tic. She said, ​‘Yes. It was for the audi­ence’. She was 8. She knew total­ly what she was doing and she’s doing talks now in Amer­i­ca and show­ing the film at the uni­ver­si­ty she’s at in New York. The film real­ly gave her a plat­form and empow­ered her and she empow­ered the film. It was a two-way thing.

What does it take to make such per­son­al­ly moti­vat­ed films?

Longinot­to: On the film before last I remem­ber think­ing, ​‘I can’t do this film. This is just too much for me. I don’t know how to do it’ and I was absolute­ly ter­ri­fied. It felt like I was going to my death. When some­thing is the cen­tre of your life and it means every­thing… so I wrote myself a lit­tle note on a post-it and I put it by the phone and it said, ​‘Kim, in three months time you will read this and you will get through this’ and it was just to say, this per­son that is going to come back, even if every­thing col­laps­es and there’s no film, you will read this mes­sage and you’ll still be you and you’ll still have your bed upstairs and your life and you won’t be on the street – once you’ve lived on the street you nev­er real­ly get over the fear of being back on the street but that’s pathet­ic because that’s just such an obvi­ous fear, but there’s much deep­er inse­cu­ri­ties that I think we all have that we cov­er up.

What beliefs do you car­ry with you into your filmmaking?

Fleifel: I don’t think that there are dif­fer­ences between peo­ple. I don’t believe that. But some peo­ple insist that there are dif­fer­ences and there are peo­ple that were cho­sen and oth­ers that weren’t and some who have the rights and oth­ers who don’t. These notions are com­plete­ly mean­ing­less and point­less and they serve noth­ing but tak­ing human­i­ty into a dark place. I hope we can see an end to that some­how. I think that it’s impor­tant for any prospect of peace between any­one you real­ly need to look at the past so that you can put it behind you so that it doesn’t just come back and haunt you all the time.

Does your film­mak­ing stem from per­son­al deter­mi­na­tion or is it more collaborative?

Oppen­heimer: You can have all the moti­va­tion and deter­mi­na­tion in the world but – par­tic­u­lar­ly for non-fic­tion film­mak­ers whose ideas don’t sim­ply spring from the mind it at the very least involves an engage­ment with the world – the first thing you must do is build that team. Know how to choose the peo­ple that will nur­ture you and chal­lenge you but in a lov­ing way and avoid the peo­ple who will take any plea­sure in tear­ing you down. Build­ing that team is essen­tial and then once you do that, even though I’m the direc­tor, you can nev­er real­ly dis­tin­guish who’s made what con­tri­bu­tion. You become a col­lec­tive body. You work togeth­er. One entire­ly depends on the friends and fam­i­ly you assem­ble and you build through mak­ing a film and in order to make a film. In the case of these two films I’m espe­cial­ly indebt­ed, of course, to Adi Rukun whose friend­ship I enjoyed through the mak­ing of both films and who first took the lead in encour­ag­ing me to film the per­pe­tra­tors. And espe­cial­ly I guess to my Indone­sian crew who remain anony­mous. These are peo­ple who gave a decade of their lives, some of them, chang­ing their careers from jour­nal­ists, human rights lawyers, heads of NGOs, uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sors, film­mak­ers; risk­ing their safe­ty, know­ing they couldn’t take cred­it for their work in order to make these films because they felt that was so impor­tant. These peo­ple have been such lov­ing friends and I hope I’ve been that to them as well.

What can films do for us at their best?

Longinot­to: Help us to not feel alone and not feel so weird. A lot of the time I do feel weird. I feel I’m dif­fer­ent and I’m weird. And I’m not. I’ve got real­ly love­ly friends. I watch things and I realise that we’re not weird but soci­ety, well it’s not even soci­ety but the world tries to make us feel weird when we don’t fit in with the images that we see.

Fleifel: Mak­ing films, a lot of peo­ple see it as some kind of a roman­ti­cised pro­fes­sion, ​‘Oh it’s a dream job.’ It’s real­ly hard work. Just to get a chance to make a film is such a huge priv­i­lege so if you final­ly get a chance to do some­thing then hope­ful­ly it would make sense to do some­thing that can bring peo­ple togeth­er, oth­er than just bring­ing them togeth­er in a dark room and have them eat pop­corn but actu­al­ly bring them emo­tion­al­ly, men­tal­ly togeth­er. Just con­nect people.

Oppen­heimer: What I hope these two films have done is made it pos­si­ble for the soci­ety to talk about these things. Into the space opened by The Act of Killing has come The Look of Silence, show­ing how urgent­ly need­ed truth, jus­tice and some form of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion are in Indone­sia and show­ing – through Adi’s dig­ni­fied exam­ple and also the human­i­ty of the one perpetrator’s daugh­ter who finds the courage to be able to apol­o­gise on her father’s behalf – show­ing through those exam­ples what such a dia­logue might look like.

The last words of this piece go to Adi Rukun, whose broth­er, Ram­li, was tor­tured and mur­dered by geno­cide per­pe­tra­tors. The ago­nis­ing nuances of what he and his fam­i­ly have suf­fered sub­se­quent­ly form the most emo­tion­al aspect of Oppenheimer’s film.

Adi Rukun: I am very hap­py and grate­ful for the mak­ing of this film because it opened the way for 50 years of silence to be bro­ken. I’m feel­ing very hon­oured that I could con­tribute to the more open debate and dis­cus­sion from the gen­er­al pub­lic about the’65 issue which is still con­sid­ered a scary moment in Indone­sian his­to­ry. There’s a say­ing, ​‘even the walls have ears’. For fam­i­lies that were involved in this event, the rest of the mem­bers con­sid­er that it’s a bur­den for them. Even among the mem­bers they try to dis­tance them­selves from the so-called com­mu­nists. I feel very hon­oured that I could con­tribute to this screen­ing, this mak­ing of the film.

There is proof that the screen­ing and the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the film con­tributed to a larg­er effect. For exam­ple, the sec­ond screen­ing of The Look of Silence has been endorsed by two state agen­cies; The Nation­al Human Rights Com­mis­sion and the Jakar­ta Arts Coun­cil. It was watched in the sec­ond batch of screen­ings to an audi­ence of 3,000. It has been screened fur­ther – 3,500 screen­ings all over Indone­sia – also the film man­aged to attract media atten­tion in the coun­try, to address what hap­pened in ​’65. Most of the uni­ver­si­ties in Indone­sia have now screened this film. In the very few cas­es where the uni­ver­si­ty author­i­ties banned the screen­ing, it pro­voked a move­ment from the stu­dents. They got a new ener­gy to fight against these injus­tices. Before the screen­ings of The Look Of Silence, the stu­dents wouldn’t dare to ques­tion what uni­ver­si­ty author­i­ties were say­ing about anything.