Vigil to Close The School of The Americas, Fort Benning, Georgia 2007

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

It has been sixteen months since I have written to you. Working on my film Keep On Moving Forward, The Story of Emma’s Revolution has been an amazing journey and it’s not over.  I want to tell you not only what I have accomplished but what I have learned.

But first I want to acknowledge it is just twelve days to election day which many of us feel may determine the course of our nation, for better or worse, in years to come.  It is a good time to recall the words, written in prison, of Vaclav Havel.

The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand, above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world.  Either we have hope within in or we don’t; it’s a dimension of the soul ; it is not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of a situation… Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather our ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

 

For me the creative process of making a film, a book, or a song also requires the essential ingredient of hope that Havel writes about.  Pat Humphries and Sandy Opatow, the two women I am making this film about, know about this hope on a visceral level.

They have attended and sung at an annual vigil to close down The School Of The Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia for fifteen years.  Known as the School of the Assassins it is where soldiers from [mostly]  Latin American countries are trained in “counter-insurgency” warfare.  SOA graduates have murdered, tortured, and maimed thousands of civilians in the service of oppressive regimes.

I was given some  video footage of Pat and Sandy at Fort Benning in 2007, shot by a filmmaker who, like me, was interested in their work. There were hours of material. Could I find elements to fashion a scene that tells the story of the amazing community of people who returned year after year, to peacefully protest SOA’s existence?

Procession to honor the dead, Fort Benning, Georgia 2007

I began with simply looking.

There were moments that resonated.  I extracted and labelled “selects,”  clips of sound and video that stood out to me:  musicians greeting one another and tuning their instruments backstage; men, woman and children in a solemn procession as the names of the murdered were called out; hundreds of small white crosses placed on the chain link fence around the military base;  soldiers and state troopers monitoring thousands of peaceful demonstrators and Pat and Sandy singing the song they wrote about The School of the Americas, One by One.

 

We have paid against our will

While men torture, maim and kill.

We’ll return thousands strong

Until right replaces wrong.

 

 

Making a select is like picking a flower without knowing, in the moment, whether it will fit in a bouquet.  Another way I think about it is word magnets.  Have you ever seen sentences composed on a refrigerator door from individual words printed on tiny magnetic strips?  A  “select” is like one of those words.  If I diligently collect enough “words” I will have a vocabulary, a bank of options with which I can create a scene.  The “words” or the “flowers” are not just fragments of video; they are Pat and Sandy’s commentary, their music and song.

There’s a parallel with the concept of hope that Havel wrote about.  I show up at my computer to sift through hours of footage looking for flowers, looking for words.  There’s no guarantee of success.  A scene may never get off the ground or may arrive stillborn after hours of labor.  But if I am lucky and the stars are aligned, there is a quickening.  One word, one shot, one sound follows another which follows another which begins to make sense.   Then, as if by magic, a scene emerges that comes alive and sings. I feel a sudden and intense joy. It is why I am a filmmaker.