Darfur Diaries Interview with Gayle Smith
As a follow up to the Center for American Progress’ screening of Darfur Diaries, Anne Shoup and Paige Fitzgerald interviewed Gayle Smith, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, who introduced the Center’s screening of the film. Full audio is available here. Gayle Smith served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council from 1998-2001. She has spent much of her career in international affairs in the field and in 1999 won the National Security Council's Samuel Nelson Drew Award for Distinguished Contribution in Pursuit of Global Peace for her role in the successful negotiation of a peace agreement between Eritrea and Ethiopia.

Reel Progress: Please describe the situation in Darfur and whether you think it deserves to be called a “genocide.”

Gayle Smith: There is a legal term for genocide that was deliberately coined, both for the reason of highlighting genocide when it occurs, and also to prevent misuse of the term. By that standard, genocide is an intent to wipe out a people in whole or in part, based on their ethnicity, their religion, or some other definition. I think what we are seeing in Darfur is clearly genocide. At the same time, there is a part of me that wonders whether we really need to spend a whole lot of time debating whether it’s genocide. When you have millions of people displaced, when you have hundreds of thousands dead, where you clearly have a government in league with the militia on the ground in Darfur, attacking civilians including young kids, whether or not it’s genocide shouldn’t really matter. The fact of the matter is that a huge number of civilians are under attack by a government that should, in fact, be protecting them.

Reel Progress: Currently there is strong grassroots support and much media attention behind the movement to end the genocide in Darfur. How is the nature of this activism different from activism on other international issues and cases of mass atrocity? How can organizations best capitalize on people’s concern to make a real difference in Darfur?

Gayle Smith: Well I think the activism is extraordinary. It’s smart; it’s been sustained. I think the leadership has really been from two communities—the faith-based community and young people and students. I haven’t seen anything like it since the days of the anti-apartheid movement. I think everyone who’s out there trying to do something is really to be credited, whether it’s traditional advocacy that focuses on the politics or a sort of cultural advocacy, like the women who made the film Darfur Diaries. You’ve got musicians and bands doing things, writers and poets contributing, artists from across the spectrum helping to inform the public and motivating people to standup and say this matters. That’s really what’s important. The conventional wisdom is that, particularly in Africa, the American people really don’t care enough for a politician to take a risk or spend any resources, capital or otherwise, on stopping something like a genocide in Darfur. I think the message that politicians are getting from across the country is that actually Americans do care, and we feel very strongly that our principles and our values demand that we be in the forefront of trying to stop the genocide in Darfur. So I think the activism is a great thing. In terms of building on it, I think there are a few things we need to do. One of the things we hope will contribute is a campaign that the Center for American Progress and the International Crisis Group are going to be launching called “Enough!”, which is an attempt to go deeper on some of the advocacy and bring in a little more field information. Part of what we need to do is build the case for a United States that is in the forefront of preventing mass atrocities in the future. So how, while at the same time advocating an end to the genocide in Darfur, do we build a constituency that, next time we see one of these crisis, and tragically we will, says, “Let’s get out ahead of the curve; let’s prevent it rather than what we’re doing now which is responding late.”

Click here to continue reading Gayle’s interview.

Reel Progress Films Receive Oscar Buzz
During last year’s award season, two Reel Progress films received numerous nominations and one took home top honors. Good Night, and Good Luck nominations included Best Picture, Best Screenplay, and Best Achievement in Directing at the Oscars and Outstanding Performance by a Cast at the SAG Awards. Crash won Best Picture and Best Screenplay at the Oscars and Outstanding Performance by a Cast at the SAG Awards.

This year, the Reel Progress films garnering Oscar attention fall under Best Documentary Feature. The War Tapes, The Ground Truth, The Trials of Darryl Hunt, and Shut Up and Sing all made the “Short List” of the 15 feature-length documentaries eligible for nominations at this year’s Academy Awards. Political documentaries are stealing the show this year with Iraq-focused movies My Country, My Country and Iraq in Fragments, as well as Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?, the Ralph Nader film An Unreasonable Man, and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth are also on the “Short List.”

The War Tapes, which won Best Documentary Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival, follows three members of the New Hampshire National Guard during their journeys through Iraq and their families’ experiences at home. The soldiers (a Lebanese-American student who loves politics, Zach Bazzi; a carpenter and aspiring writer, Steve Pink; and a resolute patriot and father of two, Mike Moriatry) took the digital video cameras given to them by Director Deborah Scranton and mounted them to gun turrets, inside dashboards, and on their Kevlar helmets and vests to document their lives in Iraq. The film is currently the only Iraq documentary to be filmed exclusively by soldiers.

The Ground Truth delves even deeper into the difficulties of reintegration than The War Tapes. The film, which received rave reviews at the Sundance Film Festival, examines the lives of several soldiers who are unable to completely escape the memories and pain of combat after their tour of duty. Although far removed from their struggles in Iraq, they find themselves at home struggling with their everyday lives. Ultimately, the soldiers choose to fight to end the war for which they had just risked their lives.

The Trials of Darryl Hunt follows the story of a young black man who spent the first part of his life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. In 1984, Hunt was convicted of the brutal murder of a young white newspaper reporter and sentenced to live imprisonment based on the testimony of a former Ku Klux Klan member. Although ten years later DNA evidence cast serious doubts on his involvement in the murder, he remained in jail for another ten years. The film documents the aftermath of this wrongful conviction through the eyes of an investigative journalist, a dedicated defense attorney, and an innocent man.

Barbara Kopple and Cecelia Peck’s Shut Up and Sing chronicles the lives of musical group the Dixie Chicks over a three year period after its lead singer, Natalie Maines, nonchalantly made an anti-Bush remark during a concert in England. After the story was picked up by the American media, the Chicks went from country darlings to traitors overnight. The film jumps back and forth between the drama surrounding their tour in 2003 (including concern over ticket sales, boycotts, and death threats) and the recording of their follow-up album, which included the cathartic single, “Not Ready to Make Nice.”

Watch the announcement of Oscar nominations on January 23 and the Oscar broadcast on February 25 to see if any Reel Progress films make the cut!

Wholphin? Yes. Wholphin.
Contributing article by Brent Hoff, Executive Producer of Wholphin
I first learned about wholphins from a scientific journal called, if I remember correctly, “Aquatic Mammal.” It sounds like a joke but it’s true, a wholphin is a hybrid cross between a 400-pound bottlenose dolphin and a 4,000-pound false killer whale. (False killer whales are all black and, like killer whales, aren’t whales technically, but that’s beside the point.) Wholphins are a strange new emerging species. Unlike most hybrids, they produce fertile offspring and yet hardly anyone has heard of them, much less seen one.

Last January, my friend Dave Eggers and I started a DVD Magazine. The idea was to provide a home for all the films out there that for various reasons get lost in the vast ocean of media and remain largely unseen. In other words, cinematic “Wholphins.” We had both come across these incredible films that had disappeared because they were either too short to show in theatres, too odd to show on TV, or too politically controversial to fit anywhere. Wholphin is hard to pronounce, difficult to spell, and no one has any idea what it means or how it relates to what we’re doing, but it’s just right, somehow. (And frankly, the best runner up I could think of was “The Naval Academy of Film.”) Somewhere between YouTube and Viacom there is a whole new emerging species of film being made without regard for the various time and content constraints of TV, Film studios, or the Internet.

We have released three issues so far, including films by Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Steven Soderbergh, and Errol Morris. We have found incredible works from Yemen, Japan, France, Iran, and Sweden. We also like to make films. We make films about squid, Andy Richter’s shoes, drunk bees, and occasionally we do things like hold crying competitions and play volleyball at the US Mexico border using the wall as a net. I have the funnest job in the world and I’m incredibly happy that people seem to be liking this new chimera.

-Brent Hoff
Executive Producer & Volleyball Maverick
Wholphin
Reel Progress will hold a screening of Wholphin videos with Brent Hoff later this spring.


Films Worth Seeing
Below you'll find a collection of well-made films with strong progressive themes that we can happily recommend. Click on the hyperlink to see the trailer or add it to your Netflix queue.

In Theaters Now
Children of Men
In 2027, in a chaotic world in which humans can no longer procreate, a former activist agrees to help transport a miraculously pregnant woman to a sanctuary at sea, where her child's birth may help scientists save the future of humankind.

The Last King of Scotland
Forest Whitaker delivers a ferociously commanding performance as bloodthirsty Ugandan president Idi Amin in Kevin MacDonald’s The Last King of Scotland. Adapted from the novel by Giles Foden, the film recounts Amin’s horrific reign through the eyes of a semi-fictional character, Nick Garrigan (James McAvoy), a young doctor from Scotland who travels to Uganda hoping to do some good.

Letters from Iwo Jima
Academy Award nominee Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai, Memoirs of a Geisha, Batman Begins) stars as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the American-educated general who courageously led the Japanese resistance to the massive American onslaught of the island of Iwo Jima.

The Tiger and the Snow
Soon after the start of hostilities in Iraq, Rome-based lovestruck poet and lecturer Attilio heads to Baghdad when he learns from his friend, Iraqi poet Fuad, that the woman he loves, Vittoria, has been critically injured in a bomb explosion. Attilio does everything in his power to save her, risking his own life amidst the chaos of war.

The Painted Veil
Based on the classic novel by W. Somerset Maugham, “The Painted Veil” is a love story set in the 1920s that tells the story of a young English couple, Walter, a middle class doctor, and Kitty, an upper-class woman, who get married for the wrong reasons and relocate to Shanghai, where she falls in love with someone else.

The Pursuit of Happyness
In 1981, Chris Gardner was a struggling salesman for little-needed medical bone density scanners and supporting his young son, Christopher. In the face of this difficult life, Chris has the desperate inspiration to try for a stockbroker internship where one in 20 has a chance of a lucrative full time career. Together, father and son struggle through homelessness, jail time, tax seizure, and the overall punishing despair in a quest that would eventually make Gardner a respected millionaire.

Coming Soon
The Lives of Others (In Theaters February 9th)
Traces the gradual disillusionment of Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), a highly skilled officer who works for the Stasi, East Germany’s all-powerful secret police. His mission is to spy on a celebrated writer and actress couple, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck).

Now on DVD
Quinceanera
This sensitive coming-of-age drama, a 2006 Sundance Film Festival award winner, tells the story of Magdalena (Emily Rios), who, on the brink of her 15th birthday, finds her comfortable existence shattered by the discovery that she's pregnant. Cast out by her parents, the once-privileged teen finds safe haven with a great-granduncle and a gay cousin (Jesse Garcia) who introduce her to a world far different from her gentrified middle-class life.

Reel Progress Features
For Your Consideration
Industry Insider
Films Worth Seeing

For a complete list of Reel Progress films, please visit our website.

Look for our upcoming screening of Wholphin and a screening of Maxed Out on Capitol Hill.

Watch the videos from the Shut Up and Sing panel on seeProgress