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Two or three things about activism

Joanne Richardson
73 min., Romania, 2008.

A counter-documentary about activism in Romania that simultaneously questions what it means to make video politically. 2 or 3 Things about Activism begins with a richness of sound and image, but becomes increasingly more bare and fragmented, preventing an easy identification. It doesn't try to represent Romanian activism, but to intervene in it from the inside.
"It was the beginning or middle of 2007. We traveled across Romania, to make a film about activism. Who is this we? The obvious beginning would be to confess our ideologies. But the obvious is always too simple. You wanted to make an objective document. My motivation was more subjective. It began from a failure. A five-year failure of activism. I wanted to believe the failure was not mine, but the failure of the context." (voiceover)
"After escaping from a totalitarian past, everything evil and dictatorial is linked with the left, and liberal democracy and capitalism appear as the only correct system. Whenever you try to speak of social activism you're automatically labeled a communist. It's very hard to get any feedback from young people, not to mention from our parents generation." (Victor, Food Not Bombs, Bucharest)
http://subsol.c3.hu/joanne/video_activism.html

July 24, 2011