- by Thom Powers, April 21, 2011
Written by STF blogger Cameron Carnegie
Like a photograph that accidentally captures something historical, the members of the Kartemquin Films collaborative who made The Chicago Maternity Center Story initially sought to bring to light the plight of women who would be affected by the 1974 closing of the maternity center. An affiliate of Northwestern University, the center offered a low cost, midwife-attended home-birth. But a deeper reality was that the center gave the women and their children a chance to live.
In the 1970s, minority women seemed to understand that having a baby in a Chicago hospital meant they were four times more likely to “die” in childbirth, and that their babies were two times as likely to die as their white counterparts. The film’s gentle voice-over delivers that bone-chilling reality with a calm detachment. The camera, unknown as a potential adversary at the time, communicates without mistake the hospital board members’ disregard for the fragile existence of the women.
None of the board members had the slightest concern for the women, who, without a $50 midwife option, had only a $600 local or $1200 private hospital delivery available to them. Advocating for themselves in front of the board, the women never mention the statistics. But as the film evolves it catches the moment—the exact heartbeat—when health became business first, and patient-care second.
The Chicago Maternity Center supporters starkly contrast the board members who are primarily men, old and white. In a lingering video snapshot, the administrators’ callousness leaps off the screen. Smirks and eye-rolling eventually come back to haunt board members lacking the media savvy to restrain their contempt. With every dismissive gesture captured, the disdain for the women is recorded. There, for posterity to view, administrators would learn their lesson—although too late for the center.
The Chicago Maternity Center Story is a black and white snapshot that today shows us that our healthcare system hasn’t come that far. That system is still driven by profit, and not our best interests.
This film illustrates the media-suppressed reality that giving birth at home is actually desirable. The environment has fewer germs and lacks many of the compromising variables and motives that exist in a hospital. The film includes footage of a young black woman giving birth at home with a midwife from the center in attendance. It shows a difficult birth (not for the faint hearted) that is actually rendered almost commonplace by the skill of the veteran midwife. The breech is merely a fact to be dealt with not a cause for panic. The young woman is lucid and calm once the birth of her healthy baby boy is over.
With the challenge of his birth overcome, the audience learns during Q&A he only lived 17 years in the neighborhood that wouldn’t qualify as upper-class. His mother, proud to have been a part of the film could only say, according to the filmmakers, “I was glad to have him as long as I did.”
Following the screening, STF moderated a Q&A with Kartemquin filmmakers Gordon Quinn and Suzanne Davenport, and film subject Laura Newman.
[Photo: Gordon Quinn, courtesy of Simon Luethi]
Question: What was your motive in making the film?
Gordon Quinn:We wanted to make films that would help change society. [Quinn went on to make the highly regarded “Hoop Dreams” documentary.]
Suzanne Davenport: I was at Columbia and Jenny Rohrer and I were going to made a film for coursework. Originally we hoped to make it to save the center. But by the time we were done – it took us one year to shoot and four to edit - it was closed. When I had my own baby unexpectedly at home, the words from the film’s midwife saying, “Just let the body do its work,” came to mind and I was suddenly at peace.
Q: What are your feelings watching the movie now?
Laura Newman: I lived in Chicago at the time and now I live in New York. Sometimes I feel like I’m going back to 1954 in this country with women’s reproductive rights. The maternity center had such a rich history. Then you saw the beginning of big medicine which meant the demise of the Women’s Maternity Center.
Related Film/Screening:
THE CHICAGO MATERNITY CENTER STORY by Jerry Blumenthal, Suzanne Davenport, Sharon Karp, Gordon Quinn, Jennifer Rohrer
- by Thom Powers, April 21, 2011
I write with shock and sadness over yesterday’s deaths of Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington in Libya. In February, Tim showed his short film DIARY at STF and gave a thoughtful discussion afterward. We met only a few times, so others can testify to his career better than me. But I knew Chris for many years and want to add a few thoughts.
The New York Times Lens blog has published a tribute that does a fine job of getting Chris’ attributes, the way he defied the cliches of war reporting as a person. He was level-headed, neither cynical nor indulgently romantic about his profession. He took a long view of history as the son of European immigrants who had memories of WWII. He was very good with words which you can hear in his NPR interview or read in his articles. Those pieces were often written for small publications or blogs, less for career advancement than for the urge to contribute as an eyewitness. Chris had earned the security of employment at Getty Images, but he took great pleasure in side projects like setting images to music for small performances.
He was my favorite dinner companion, possessing a rare perspective on what’s happening in the world, but also a good listener. He was quick-witted. He liked teaching. He took interest in other people’s work. One of his last Facebook messages was to congratulate colleagues who had won awards.
He didn’t have the self-destructive bent that characterizes some war reporters. He could plan ahead. We were plotting an event in Toronto this June to show his Tahrir Square photos. He was going to get married in August. Outsiders might consider his whole profession foolhardy. But I think he considered it a privilege, albeit a dangerous one. He told an interviewer, “you see humanity at its worst, but to me it’s balanced by the fact that you also see humanity at its best. I’ve seen such examples of courage and human generosity.”
The urge to make sense of his death risks its own cliches of grandiosity. If Chris had a choice of where to die, I’m sure he wouldn’t have picked Misurata - a place so remote that newspapers can’t even agree on its spelling. While it may be obscure to us, for others it’s home where hundreds of Libyans have been killed in recent weeks. Chris, Tim and their colleagues were attempting to tell that story. Perhaps we don’t like the story - it doesn’t contain the right heroes or feel destined for a happy ending. But, still, there are lives at stake of people who are as dear to their families as Chris was to me. Why wouldn’t that be a story worth telling?
If you pressed Chris about the danger of his job, he’d point out that no one gets to pick where he dies. Or when. So just hunker down, do your best work and try to leave something of lasting value. That’s what he did.
- by Rahul Chadha, April 15, 2011
In 2005, the Dave Eggers-helmed McSweeney’s media empire was expanded to encompass lens-based media, yielding the eclectic quarterly DVD magazine Wholphin. Since then, the series has established itself as the filmic equivalent of a cabinet of curiosities for the modern age, shining a light on brilliant shorts that are too often screened at festivals, and then lost in the ether. Editions of the magazine include films that vary in category from experimental to narrative to documentary—as well as in the ill-defined spaces between. In deference to Stranger Than Fiction’s ongoing quest for truth, Wholphin curator Brent Hoff brought with him a group of short documentary films whose unifying theme seemed to be a lack thereof. But the scattershot nature of the films’ forms and topics ending up serving as a varied showcase of the elastic nature of non-fiction cinematic storytelling. Among other films, the eccentricities of an amateur chiropterist and his mother are artfully shared in the Slovenian short Arsy Varsy, while Here Comes Greatness examines a fascinating manifestation of the ennui suffered by suburban kids in Southern California. Wholphin makes one glad that someone out there is attempting to redress the short shrift given to short films. Stranger Than Fiction Artistic Director Thom Powers and Hoff gave short introductions to the films, and a Q&A followed the program. Click “Read more” below.
[Photo: From left, Thom Powers and Brent Hoff, courtesy of Cathryne Czubek]
Stranger Than Fiction: How many people here don’t really know what Wholphin is?
Brent Hoff: Wholphin is put out by McSweeney’s. It’s a DVD magazine of short films, basically its the film version of McSweeney’s. We find the most interesting films that we can and put them out because there’s not really any other organized space in which to see them. We go to festivals around the world, people send us stuff. For the first issue, I received a brown paper bag from Turkey which contained the Turkish version of The Jeffersons. We resubtitled that, then had writers like Dan Handler (a.k.a Lemony Snicket) rewrite it because we didn’t speak Turkish and had no idea what they were saying, then put that out. It’s sort of an eclectic mix of a bunch of weird things and usually very entertaining. When I looked at what we’re screening tonight, I realized that pretty much every film is about a really weird dude. That’s just totally accidental, we don’t do themes. We do a lot of narratives by well-known and completely unknown filmmakers as well. But tonight we’re showing you just the doc selections.
STF: Among the doc luminaries you’ve had in there, you’ve had weird short pieces by Errol Morris, Jessica Yu—
Hoff: Bill Morrison.
STF: There’s a lot of unexpected surprises. Tonight’s selection concentrates more on work you probably haven’t heard of before.
Hoff: Yeah, a lot of newer things. The first film was found at [the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam] called Arsy Varsy, which is just a beautiful, cathartic thing that makes you glad to be a human. I hope you guys like it.
[Arsy Varsy is screened]
Hoff: That was a really hard film for us to get, it was a Slovenian filmmaker. It was done as a school project. We contacted them and asked them if we could get it from them. They were just like, all these festivals, and all of these people wanting to see this film, it’s already been seen enough. We were like, we’re going to distribute it in the United States, and they were like, whatever. They didn’t care at all. I really love that film.
STF: Did you meet any of the filmmakers?
Hoff: No, that’s the other thing about doing this. No one speaks any English, at all. There was a little bit of writing, and they found someone to translate our e-mails. It was a really convoluted process. I would love to meet the guy, I want to hang out with him and go bat hunting. His mom is just so sweet.
STF: Now we’ve got four films.
Hoff: A lot of quicker films. The first one is a setup for the second one. A lot of people have probably seen Dock Ellis & the LSD No-No? I’m always surprised how few people have seen it. You guys are in for a freaking treat, this is an amazing short film. And then the follow up is another film about the same subject, a pitcher, called Wolf Ticket. Then I Don’t Blame the Beautiful Game, followed by Wagah, a film from Pakistan. I guess you don’t see a lot of films from Pakistan these days.
[Films are screened]
STF: Can you say anything more about those films, how you came across them or their makers?
Hoff: I think from festivals. The first film had been sent around a lot, from the No Mas website. At the same time, another guy randomly sent us Wolf Ticket, he has like 400 hours of interviews with Dock. I’m sure it’s a tyranny of choice thing where you’re like, how do you put that into a single film? Every single line—”Of course I was high on dexamyl at the time.” I Don’t Blame the Beautiful Game came in a sort of surreptitious way. If you get the Wholphin that that’s in, there’s an interview with the filmmaker, but it’s kind of the cagiest interview ever because it’s a real story, and he can’t disclose the guy’s name or anything about it. Wagah, I think we saw it at Sundance. This next film is called Here Comes Greatness. It was sent to us and had never really been seen. We edited it down to this version. If you’re squeamish about blood at all, this might not be the film for you. It’s pretty bizarre. This is a film about underground backyard wrestling in San Diego.
[Film is screened]
STF: You promised us things that we’d never seen before.
Hoff: Right. You should know that that’s going on.
STF: Anything more you can say about the makers of that film? I mean, where where the adults?
Hoff: There was one news story—it wasn’t in the film—but some local news station, after the police had been called, came and saw this crazy homemade stuff. The filmmakers just started following them around. They just felt like they had to capture it, but they were obviously very conflicted about what they were doing. I should probably be more conflicted about showing it. I feel like it’s important to see.
STF: Have there been reactions to having that out in the world?
Hoff: I think it’s powerful in the way that it shows something about our culture. The fact that there’s this dude on a wooden stretcher and they’re trying to get the shot right before they stretcher him down. It’s sort of quintessentially American to me.
STF: You thought Lord of the Flies was fiction.
Hoff: Fuckin’ A, right.
Audience: You said a couple of times that you’ve reedited material to shorten it, then put it out, how does that work?
Hoff: They own it, we just ask if we can do a Wholphin cut specifically to us. We do it on pretty much every issue. There was a film American Outrage about the Shoshone Indians. That was a feature that had been shown at a lot of festivals. But still, I hadn’t seen it, and I go to a lot of festivals. I thought we should do a 30 minute cut to just get it out to more people. They ended up releasing that on their DVD. It’s very fluid. If we do a cut and they don’t like it, we don’t put it out. It’s entirely up to them, but so far everyone has been pretty happy with it. And it gives them another avenue, people are doing lots of different versions for lots of different markets.
Audience: What percentage of films do you seek from filmmakers, versus what is submitted?
Hoff: It’s changed, it used to be that we’d seek out most of the films. But more and more it’s getting closer to 50-50. We hear something about this crazy event that occurs at the Kashmiri border, and I will seek it out—someone has to have made a film about this, and indeed, someone has.
STF: If people want to send you their short work how do they do that?
Hoff: On our website there’s a whole thing about submissions guidelines. Send us whatever. No films about beards. We’ve seen like five different films—dudes made films about their beards, the growing of their beards. We could do a whole issue of people and their beard films. I don’t know what that’s about. You know what, send your beard films. Whatever.
Audience: That last film [Here Comes Greatness] was made by professionals? Was that found footage?
Hoff: Most of that was found footage and then the filmmakers did come in and do interviews after. You can sort of tell. Then they did an edit.
Audience: Do you have to worry about releases when you distribute?
Hoff: The filmmakers have to get releases for the most part. They establish that they get the rights. And we generally trust them that they’re telling us the truth. We try to do things by the book.
STF: But other times you make bold decisions. You released the film The Power of Nightmares that other people didn’t want to touch.
Hoff: Yes, there’ve been times when we were a little more loose. The Power of Nightmares is on our second, third and fourth issues, it’s a three-hour documentary by Adam Curtis that no one in the United States would touch because of its political content. I highly recommend seeing it, you can download it from archive.org if you don’t want to get the Wholphin issues.
Audience: Can you talk about the economics of Wholphin? Is it fully funded through subscriptions?
Hoff: Yeah, we’re subscription based. It works on a magazine business model, and we’re also in stores. We license the films, we pay the filmmakers, not an exorbitant amount, unfortunately. But we do pay, and pretty well.
Audience: Do you ever get sequels from the same artist?
Hoff: No, which film?
Audience: CHONTO part two.
Hoff: Whoa, Carson Mell, right? He’s actually been on three or four different Wholphins. There’s an animator named Carson Mell who does amazing work and we’ve put out some of his stuff. I’ll tell him he had a request.
Audience: Are you seeing any other trends right now, whether it’s where the films are coming from regionally, or mediums? Is there anything coming out of specific places around the world, or ways in which people are shooting that you haven’t seen before?
Hoff: One thing that’s really heartening is that for a long time you’d go to a documentary festival, or any festival, and all the films would be these finger-pointing things. Where films would be like, that’s bad, and those people are bad and they’re doing bad things to people. Which is totally find and a necessary journalistic function of documentaries. But if you look at a lot of the Wholphins, we’re finding a lot of the comedic uses of documentary. There are some hilarious stories, Dock Ellis is one example of that. I think Arsy Varsy is an interesting version of that too. It’s such an artfully made film. People are definitely approaching the process differently, setting things up more. We’re seeing a lot more of that out of filmmakers, especially in Europe, Australia and places that have funding entities in place to fund films. You get a lot higher production values out of places like that.
Audience: Could you say anything more about the soccer film [I Don’t Blame the Beautiful Game]?
Hoff: I definitely tried to find out that it’s real. To the best of my knowledge it was a real story. I don’t know anything more about it, because he couldn’t tell me anything more about it.
Audience: So you just kind of took his word for it?
Hoff: You’re damn straight. We’re not a journalistic entity. I was like, I don’t want to put this film on if it’s not a real film. I did a little due diligence on the filmmaker through people I know who knew him. I think it’s real.
STF: Any previews of what’s to come on Wholphin, either documentaries or otherwise?
Hoff: Documentary-wise one film I really hope to get for the next issue is a film called Quadrangle. I don’t even know if I want to tell you about it. The filmmaker grew up in a family that was a quadrangle.
STF: An open marriage quadrangle.
Hoff: It was a very real and thoughtful and intense one, and it was an amazing film. We’re doing some special issue release of Wholphin. Rough House—Danny McBride and those guys—came up to me at Sundance. We might do a special issue of Wholphin or a bonus disc with them. I’ve been trying to do a Choose Your Own Adventure disc for a while. Initially we were going to try to do this with Josh Brolin, but we might do it with Danny McBride. So you’ll be a big hairy man trying to stalk him—we’re working out the idea right now. We might do a James Franco special issue, and then a Joseph Gordon-Levitt special issue. We might dabble in features if the right one comes along too.
Related Film/Screening:
WHOLPHIN by
- by Rahul Chadha, April 07, 2011
The morality issue at play in the film Stolen is Manichean in its clarity—slavery is unarguably one of the most abhorrent crimes that humanity can perpetrate against itself. But as filmmakers Dan Fallshaw and Violeta Ayala discovered, the politics of sharing the stories of slavery they encountered in Polisario Front-run refugee camps in Algeria proved to be much more complicated. After traveling to the camps to document a family reunion in verite style, Ayala and Fallshaw were forced to make a hard turn after being told tales of modern-day oppression; the second half of the film shifts into thriller territory as we watch the pair struggle to tell the film’s story, while also navigating the minefield politics engulfing the continued conflict between Morocco and the Polisario Front. The filmmakers have since come under heavy criticism from some quarters for their handling of the film’s subjects, who later withdrew their consent to appear in the film. But it’s difficult to figure out how much of this and other attacks originated with the Polisario Front itself, which was resistant to admitting to the existence of slavery traditions in their refugee camps. Stolen perhaps raises more questions than it answers, but does so in the tradition of the best sort of political art. As always, it remains to the viewer to decide exactly where the truth lies. Following the screening, STF Artistic Director Thom Powers spoke with Fallshaw and Ayala. Click “Read more” below for the Q&A.
(Photo: from left, Thom Powers, Violeta Ayala and Dan Fallshaw, courtesy of Simon Luethi)
STF: The film was finished two years ago, can you bring us up to date with what’s been happening with you and this film, and with the situations in this film?
Dan Fallshaw: The film’s been touring all over the world. It’s been to about 60 or 70 festivals now. We’re still pushing to get it broadcast. With regards to the characters in the camps, they’re still in the camps. Nothing has changed with regard to their lives. There’s more attention on this issue now, and there are more people talking about slavery in the camps and slavery in Western Sahara. It’s funny because when we finished I thought, great, we’re finished with this film, we’re going to get this out there and people are going to talk about this issue and things are going to really change. Two years later it’s essentially the same, only now people know about it.
STF: You were faced with the character Faitim in the film coming out later and contradicting things in the film. Can you talk about that experience?
Fallshaw: When we went to Sydney—it’s in the film, you saw it and know how we felt.
Violeta Ayala: It’s really very tough because we, in a sense, did this for Faitim and her children, and everyone else in those camps. I know that in a sense the film has improved her life because the Polisario tried to prove that slavery does not exist. So they say Faitim is not a slave, and she can travel and everyone can visit her in the camps. Every NGO, every person who comes from overseas goes and sees her, so she’s a little celebrity in the camp. But the other characters are not, and I don’t know what’s going on with them, or what happened to them. We felt sad, but if I go back two years, I would have done the same exact thing. Because I believe that it’s not Faitim who is against the film. Faitim was smiling watching the film in Sydney. I was behind her and I could see her, she was smiling. And she told her mother, at the time, that we didn’t put half the things we told her about slavery in the film, and that she was safe. It was the other ones who were in trouble.
Audience: I’ve been filming a lot in Algeria too and I was surprised because you did show the interviews of the people who incriminated themselves by testifying against slavery who then withdrew their support. I filmed a bunch of gay guys I was staying with in northeast Algeria. They said, you can use this, just don’t let anyone in Algeria see it.
STF: Can you address that difficult choice about what to include?
Fallshaw: In the camps everybody made it clear that they wanted to speak up. Matala and his friends came to Mauritania and they were afraid but they wanted to say something because they were sick and tired of things being like this in the camps. The Polisario knew who we were making the film with.
Ayala: We had a Polisario driver who was our minder who was following us all the time. I remember [an interviewee] said to me, I’d rather die than have my children taken away from me, than being raped by an Arab. I’d rather die, and I don’t want to continue like this. And please repeat everything that I’m saying. And we didn’t. People said a lot more than we’re telling you, but we had to protect them. I think if we didn’t make the film, if we didn’t put in what they want, we would be accomplices to the slavery, and this would happen for another 100, 200 years more.
Audience: I’ve spent time in the camps, I was there just this last October-November. One thing that disturbed me in watching the film is a kind of over-generalization. First of all, nobody denies that there has been slavery in this part of the world. What I found interesting is that your focus is on the Polisario and the camps, with a little side thing to occupied territory. The U.N. woman, I’ve seen a larger interview with her about this issue, and she’s saying it’s basically a cultural issue. Nobody denies that slavery exists in this part of the world. The focus of the movie though is that the Polisario is supporting it and maintaining it. That’s what I get from the film. So you keep talking about Polisario and slavery in the camp as if it’s an accepted practice that they’re trying to keep hush hush, when in fact I think it’s a lot more complex than that. I also noticed some mistranslations, and just generalizations. That last scene for example, what was that supposed to say? When it said all we want is liberation and peace? Was she speaking about slavery, writing in the sand?
Fallshaw: The Polisario made their own role in the film, and that’s really what it comes down to. When we first learned about slavery in the camps, we went to the Polisario, naively, and said, can this be happening? We went there in support of the Polisario to make a film about their fight for Western Sahara and we found something different. The problem was, we couldn’t just turn our backs on that. We were detained in the camps because of this. We had to leave the camps because of this. When we went to Western Sahara, we found the same thing there, and we couldn’t say, oh no, it doesn’t exist. So in effect, what you’re saying is about us focusing on the Polisario. We made a film that says slavery exists in the camps, slavery exists in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara.
Audience: And Mauritania, and Niger and Senegal—the whole area. It’s a broad problem.
Fallshaw: I absolutely agree. The thing is, nobody’s talking about it.
Ayala: We didn’t go to these camps to make a film about slavery. We went there to make a film about a family reunion, and that’s what we found. And Matala and all of them told us their stories, and I’m not going to turn my back on them. We also made effort to go to Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, but not to find slavery. We went to talk to Faitim’s mother and find the story from her. And it happened that the black people there were ready to tell their stories to us. We had 20 hours of footage stolen from us, and exchanged for blank tapes.
Fallshaw: This is something that these regimes, these governments, these monarchies really don’t want to talk about.
Ayala: And the Polisario has been attacking us, what can we do about it. They made their own role in the film. What Leil writes in the sand, I think it’s up to each person to interpret it.
Audience: It’s a nationalist phrase—
Fallshaw: So you’re telling me you know what Leil was thinking. I’m not even pretending to know what she was thinking, but you are.
Audience: She wrote a nationalist, liberation phrase. I spoke with the Polisario ambassador in D.C. about your film, and I said, what is this about slavery. And he said, slavery exists still in Western Sahara, no denial.
Fallshaw: So why are they trying to shut the film down?
Audience: It’s absolutely illegal there, they do not accept it. It’s a cultural condition—
Fallshaw: Then why are the black people coming to us to say, help us?
Audience: Because there’s racism there. I experienced racism throughout the whole area.
Ayala: But there is a liberation [document] published in the Human Rights Watch report, that says, from this day on the neck of this man is free. And it’s signed by the minister of religious and culture affairs of the Polisario. If this is not an institution than what is it? If it’s illegal, then why on earth is the minister of religion and cultural affairs of the Polisario signing these kinds of documents? It happens in the whole area, we’re not saying it doesn’t happen. But the Polisario need to be held accountable for this, and they need to change. If they say it’s illegal, they need to put some rules, that’s all we want.
Audience: I think it’s a really brave film and you’ve certainly done a good service to your characters, so I commend you for that. I’ve also filmed in the Polisario camps, and I have a lot of friends within the Polisario and outside of the Polisario. I think you left a very important issue out of the film, which makes a large difference. The Polisario army is a government in exile which is not recognized by the international community. It’s an army acting as a government, there’s no democratic space. They’ve been fighting to have their territory given back to them for 35 years. The reason the Polisario was the bad guy in your story is pretty obvious. Anything that talks badly about the Polisario is going to put them in a weaker position to negotiate any possibility to go back to their territory.
STF: Can you talk about the politics of the Polisario and how that affects their position?
Fallshaw: The Polisario are a liberation front, and a left-wing organization fighting for the Western Sahara against Morocco, before it was Spain. And we went to make a film in support of this. But we found something different. The Polisario can be whatever. I’m not against their politics, I’m not against their fight for Western Sahara. What I’m against is that black people in these refugee camps are living in conditions of slavery in which they do not want to live anymore. And they want it to change. When the film was finished, when we went to the Polisario, I thought they would say, we have to fix this, we have to change, we have to bring people in and investigate and do all these things. Why not? If they’re now saying, it exists, it’s a problem, it’s illegal, then stand up and say, slavery is a problem here, it’s illegal, we’re going to get rid of it.
Ayala: I believe two wrongs don’t make a right. There are a lot of people supporting the Polisario’s liberation struggle. Nobody talks about slavery in this area. I’m sorry for the Polisario, I feel very sad that this is happening in their territory, in their land, as well as in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara. I’m not going to say, these guys are fighting for independence. I don’t know what I believe anymore about that conflict, I just want the people in Western Sahara and all northern Africa to be free, that’s all.
Audience: I wonder if you could define just what your definition of slavery means.
Fallshaw: When you talk about slavery, people imagine chains, they imagine whips. This is not slavery like that. The chains are in your mind. Faitim loves Deido as much as she loves herself. But Deido took her away from her parents. Deido’s father bought Embarka in a market in Mauritania when she was a little girl, and took her back to Western Sahara to serve his family. She then had children. Those children are then born slaves because their mother’s a slave. Faitim is one of those children. The father gave Faitim to his daughter as a present, and she took her to the refugee camps. These are the facts of slavery, this is what happens. Then Faitim serves Deido her whole life, does what Deido wants.
Ayala: Also they say they’re beaten. Matala told us a story about a little boy who the mother wanted to take away from the master. And the master beat the mother. Then the police came and said to the mother, the boy belongs to him so you have to go home. There’s a variation from family to family. In Mauritania there was a slave who was sent by his master to study in Paris to become an architect. He came back to Mauritania and is now one of the biggest fighters against slavery. He said, it doesn’t matter if they put me in a palace, they took me away from my mother and father, from my real, biological family. They get beaten, they get taken away. The man has rights over the women, they can rape them whenever they want. Some masters are good to them, and some masters are bad to them. [A character] said at the end, they think we’re like dogs, that we don’t have feelings like them.
[Q&A has been edited for length and clarity]
Related Film/Screening:
STOLEN by Violeta Ayala, Dan Fallshaw
- by Thom Powers, April 07, 2011
Yesterday we launched a 10 Day Documentary Challenge on Facebook to learn more about people’s favorite films.
Here’s how to participate:
* Visit http://www.facebook.com/DocumentaryChallenge and click “like” so more people learn about it.
* For 10 days, post your favorite films based on the following criteria to both your personal page and to the “Doc Challenge” page:
Day 1 - Favorite documentary
Day 2 - Favorite music documentary
Day 3 - Most underrated documentary
Day 4 - Best cinematography in a documentary
Day 5 - Favorite documentary character
Day 6 - Documentary that made you angry
Day 7 - Documentary that made you laugh
Day 8 - Most thrilling documentary
Day 9 - Best historical documentary
Day 10 - Best documentary you saw in the last year
You can also find these guidelines under the Doc Challenge’s “info tab”.
We look forward to hearing from you!
Raphaela & Thom
by Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray
by Woody Allen
by Lisa Katzman
by Thom Zimny
by Leon Gast
by Carl Colby
by Ashley Sabin and David Redmon 
