Film writer Wendy Gosselin attends the premier of a three-year film project that questions the education system worldwide.

There were two long lines of people waiting to get into the Buenos Aires premier of the documentary film ‘La Educación Prohibida’ (The Prohibited Education). Young people were drinking mate and lighting one another’s cigarettes; older people studied the crowd to try to greet someone they knew. The woman standing next to me was involved in production and very excited to talk more about the film with me. “It’s about the difference between schools and education, about how schools fail children in so many ways, making them into obedient subjects who are capable of little more than reciting what they’ve heard in class. It films educators discussing these issues in eight different countries.”

From what I gauged at the premier, there are two critical aspects of the project ‘La Educación Prohibida’. The first is the way this documentary film was made and distributed and its determination to continue on past the actual screening of the film. The idea was born three years ago when the young and clearly charismatic director Germán Doin (before the film was even shown, he received a standing ovation when he got up to speak) decided to do a short film and post it on youtube. Doin was plagued with what education should mean and what schools actually provide. His video was an invitation to others to pose similar questions, conduct interviews and come onboard the project. The final result is an audiovisual project involving a total of over 150 crew members, actors, filmmakers and artists and 704 co-producers worldwide. Monday marked the film’s premier at 151 independent screening rooms across the world. According to Doin, on Monday alone, 18,000 people had seen the film, a true achievement for a film project of this kind and a triumph for independent productions worldwide.

The second and, in my view, least interesting aspect of the project is the film itself. First of all, the film drags out across an astounding and unnecessary two hours seventeen minutes of fictional interludes, interviews with educators and textbook-like animations. As would be expected of a film with 704 co-producers, the film covers a range of topics that is too broad, covering everything from the history of humanity (rounded off with the classic depiction of the monkey standing up straighter until he at lasts takes on the form of a human male) to the history of education, with stops along the way to include comparisons of babies with tree seedlings (seedlings, it seems, take all the light and water they need from their environment; children would be best left to do the same).

For Doin and his co-producers, apparently, there is nothing worthwhile in today’s mainstream schools, which are basically enormous day care centres. The fictional interludes depict two high school students who claim that their education has taught them nothing and are willing to say as much at a school function, with renowned actor Gastón Pauls as their frustrated but somewhat sympathetic teacher. These are supplemented by actors who play clichéd Draconian teachers who stare straight at the camera and yell. We see elementary school students with their hands tied behind their backs and high school students dressed in grey t-shits reciting lessons in a robotic twang. I could almost hear Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ playing in the background.

These fictional interludes are contrasted with thoughtful onscreen quotes by figures such as Maria Montessori, Paulo Freire, Albert Einstein, and Rudolf Steiner and by real life interviews with more “progressive” educators in the tradition of Waldorf, Kilpatrick, Sudbury and Montessori. They hail from institutions like the Pachamama School in Ecuador, the Ideas School in Colombia and the Red de Educación Libre in Spain: schools with no grades, no exams, and open groups comprised of students of all ages where young people move freely about according to their interests and abilities. The focus, according to these educators, should be on liberty and simultaneous exploration; children correct themselves and teachers limit themselves to serving as helpful guides. However, the few scenes where we actually see “examples” of this type of education are limited to nursery schools where children touch each other and build things out of blocks (doesn’t this happen at nursery schools everywhere?). Other depictions of desirable education are bucolic scenes where children roam free in large green spaces, locations for education that I am hard-pressed to imagine in an urban setting like Buenos Aires. From time to time, childish animations pop up showing frowning stick figures with bubble captions that read: “I am not just a number.”

There are some interesting questions posed by ‘La Educación Prohibida’: school curriculums are often obsolete and out of touch with the real world and many students do get lost in the system and then lose their desire to learn. Yet although we hear plenty from the representatives of the educational institutions where students are supposedly encouraged to explore their own individual potential, the students themselves are absent from the big screen. And in spite of the film’s broad criticism of the school system, real-life public school teachers of the countries surveyed are missing. Couldn’t these teachers have something more to contribute than the atrocious stereotypes we are subject to in their fictional depictions? In terms of the critique of the whole educational system, another glaring omission is the difference between public and private schools. Aren’t private schools more likely to fulfil the mandates of an open, more comprehensive education the co-producers all seem to favour?

What is ultimately “prohibited” in The Prohibited Education is the possibility of examining these questions in a real, in-depth way. This perhaps reflects the age of the production team, who are all aged 21 to 24. I would be very much interested to see what Doin and his crew have to say about education 20 years from now, when they have their own children and are obliged to make certain compromises in terms of their education in order to help them find their own way in the world. Reflections such as these could be summarized in a much shorter and succinct film on the same subject. Ultimately, I am more interested in the way Doin put together an international network to explore his subject and the way he used the digital medium to get it up on the web and spread the word – as of publishing, more than a half million people had downloaded the film from the website – than in the actual film his team of ardent collaborators produced.

Prior to an epiphany in 2003, Korean/Brazilian film director Iara Lee had been immersed in the study of adapting the human limits of experience through technology. ‘Synthetic Pleasures’ (1995) panned across the subjects of virtual reality, biotechnology, plastic surgery, and designer drugs, previewing the facets of a transhuman future. “We amuse ourselves to death,” Lee quipped in a 1996 interview with Ruse Magazine.

An adoptive US-citizen and spouse of pro sports entrepreneur George Gund III, Lee was less amused by 2003. Observing the US invasion of Iraq with horror and concern over a future of self-destruction, she embarked on a documentary journey spanning five continents and answering those critics who questioned her political engagement as a filmmaker.

‘Cultures of Resistance’ (2010) – the product of Lee’s journey – is above all a testament to the power of cultural expression as a form of political activism. From the Amazon Basin to Nigeria, the Congo, Burma, Iran, and Palestine, among other locales, citizens and featured artists discuss the complexities of peace, violence, art, and resistance in pursuit of social justice.

Central to Lee’s depiction of global conflicts is the tension between waging violent and peaceful campaigns of resistance. After a barrage of themes imposed over a roving aerial map – “Imperialism”, “Oppressed Becomes Oppressor”, “Nonviolence”, “Art” – the film begins with footage from around the world on International Peace Day.

Following a disparate timeline of events that span roughly from the end of the 1980s to the present day, ‘Cultures of Resistance’ explores, side by side, the despairing mentality of resistance and hope. From the execution of Nigerian pacifist Ken Saro Wiwa in 1995, to the terror of repeated rape victims in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the fatal logic of violent mobilisation receives necessary if disheartening scrutiny, crucial to Lee’s candid portrayal of social struggle.

In the Amazon basin, chaos ensues over the Xingu dam project as an audience of sword-wielding indigenous residents ambush a representative of the project. Former child soldiers in Liberia provide chilling testimony of their abandoned life of drugs and violence. In the favelas of Rio, wanton attacks by both police and gangs prompt one artist to call the situation an “epidemic of minor conflicts everywhere”.

“Your mind must look at the darkness, but your will and action must be driven toward change,” says an Iranian activist.

The true alternative to violence, the film suggests, is resistance through art forms committed to activism. Musicians, editorial cartoonists, graffiti artists, poets, and dancers exhibit the ways in which cultural resistance facilitates education, unity, renewed identity, and the possibility of nonviolent reconciliation.

Some of the most alarming images in the film revolve around displaced children and their exposure to habitual violence. Many of the individuals interviewed lament and warn that the poverty and instability in these children’s lives will perpetuate cycles of violence in the absence of just reforms.

As in many documentaries that examine child poverty, the footage of wide-eyed kids staring into the camera lens highlights not only the gross inequality of electronics constructed from expropriated minerals, but the inadequacies of portraying daily life as these communities understand and live it. The range of locations and struggles considered in ‘Cultures of Resistance’ is so manifold that each and every instance, in its own right, could warrant several documentaries apiece.

To analyse this film strictly on the basis of the material presented would be inexcusably naïve, however, and too often ‘Cultures of Resistance’ contradicts its own criticism of the Western media’s suppression of facts.

It is beyond necessary for these underrepresented viewpoints to be heard and dignified with meaningful, committed dialogue, but the film seeks blamelessly to present a panoramic vision of a world in dire need, meanwhile condemning the left’s usual suspects of oppression to the status of monoliths.

The effect, unfortunate and short-sighted, is that deeply complicated and crucially different struggles, while informative in relative isolation, are minimised by an unspoken conviction: the superpowers of the world (“The United States and global public opinion” the film wryly jokes) will be locked in eternal antagonism.

It is no secret that Iara Lee was a proud participant in the 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla, a humanitarian mission protesting the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza. Lee was a passenger on board the Turkish MV Mavi Marmara, the only one of six vessels to clash violently with the blockading Israeli Defence Forces. In international waters, nine activists were killed and seven Israeli soldiers injured in a clear mismatch of defence capabilities.

The United Nations Human Rights Council later produced a report detailing the circumstances of the confrontation, calling Israel’s conduct a violation of human rights but also casting doubt on organisations involved in the Flotilla. More significantly for global public opinion, Lee managed to withhold some footage of the incident despite Israeli forces confiscating nearly all traces of what happened.

While Israel got a lead on international media coverage of the event, Lee’s below deck footage went severely underreported in mainstream sources until long after, giving credence to accusations of a Western stranglehold in the global public relations war.

The incident in Gaza bears significance to ‘Cultures of Resistance’ because it underscores the critical role and responsibility of the media in bringing conflicts around the world to the attention of populations everywhere.

While Lee’s film courageously empowers voices buried beneath the prevailing slant, it does too little in the way of engaging precisely those audiences it deems sources of the problem. The segment on Palestine – at times a damning and disturbing indictment of Israeli practice (deemed an apartheid regime) – lacks the kind of full contextualisation that would better serve the peace process than inflaming an intransigent neoconservative reaction. ‘Cultures of Resistance’ risks such audiences watching without seeing.

Perhaps this is part of the calculus of making a film that will encourage social and political activism. “Your anger is a gift,” Rage Against the Machine’s Zach de la Rocha often said. Rooted in the left’s countercultural tradition, it is little surprise that Lee skilfully bridges art and politics – just like the protagonists of her film and members of the Cultures of Resistance Network who do, undoubtedly, effect positive change in communities around the world.

There is a certain kind of synthetic pleasure in depicting a political aesthetic of resistance, one that assimilates righteousness, technology, and the human heart in the service of awakening cultural identity.

The question is whether ‘Cultures of Resistance’, with its global aspirations for justice and peace, stirs up viewers’ unflinching conviction at the expense of critical examination. To bring true understanding of one’s adversaries, as well as the divides separating us’s from them’s to begin with, would seem a more arduous and insecure road. But it would make us all rely less on cynicism for inspiration. Art will survive.

Piedra Libre is a documentary that narrates a journey of remembrance along the paths of truth and justice and through the ancient language of afro-american dance. With their bodies moving to the beat of the drums, hundreds of women invoke the memory of those bodies that are no longer here; people lost under Argentina’s military dictatorships. The story is told by the protagonists, who, with personal recollections, construct a collective memory for the people.

Combining art and dance with the search for human rights and remembrance, Piedra Libre is sponsored by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo LF, the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, and the national Secretariat for Human Rights. Through crowd-funding website Idea.me, the film’s creators hope to raise money to follow the protagonists as they tell their personal stories from locations outside of Buenos Aires, as well as shoot a spectacular final scene with over 100 extras.

Argentine photographer Walter Astrada’s stark photograph of a murder scene in Guatemala won first prize for ‘contemporary issues (singles)’ in the World Press Photo Contest 2007. It is typical of his gritty, unflinching images.

Maria Esperanza Gutiérrez, her body shown directly from above, had been killed by 16 bullets fired by an unidentified man. This crime, in the outskirts of Guatemala City, was part of a rising wave of attacks against women that came to be known as ‘femicide’, a phenomenon the photographer has been recording over the last couple of years.

Astrada is no stranger to death and disaster, having worked for news agencies across Latin America and the Caribbean throughout his career. This included a period in crisis-stricken Haiti following the expulsion of  President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004.

Astrada, who now lives and works in Spain, took time out from his recent visit to Buenos Aires to talk to The Argentina Independent about his work.

Why did you choose to begin your project about violence against women in Guatemala?

I wanted to do a project about violence against women in Spain, where I currently live, but when I began to read reports, Guatemala had the most alarming figures for femicide (the assassination of women because they are women) in Latin America, and at international level only Russia had higher figures.

How did you get access to the situations that you photograph in Guatemala? Did you work with the police?

I didn’t have many contacts but those that I did have were very good. The main contact was the Guatemalan women’s associations, who, among other things, gave me access to the only shelter for female victims of violence. Another contact was the diputada (female official) who facilitated access to the  Public Ministry where the women make their reports. Also I was in contact with the press office of the fire brigade that informed me when there were cases of dead bodies appearing.

In particular, how did you take the photo that won the World Press Photo prize?

My contact at the fire brigade called me by phone and told me that the body of an assassinated woman had appeared on the outskirts of Guatemala City. Automatically we headed towards the scene of the crime with the taxi driver with whom I had been working throughout my whole time in Guatemala. I was able to take this photo thanks to some neighbours who gave me access to an abandoned house which was situated directly over the body. I spent five hours up there – two hours until the experts from the Public Ministry  arrived and three hours while they did the tests.

Previously you worked in Haiti, when it was suffering a state of crisis and collapse in 2004 – how did that feel?

At that time I was working for AP in Dominican Republic (DR) and as Haiti and DR share the island of Hispaniola I was the first photographer that they brought to cover what was going on in Haiti that required support. In the two and a half years that I lived in DR I spent seven months in Haiti, counting all my trips there.

Do you ever feel in danger doing your work?

At times yes – if there are violent situations it’s logical that you are in danger.

In Argentina you covered the fall of President Fernando de la Rua in 2001 – did you just happen to be here? What was this experience like?

At that time I was living and working in Paraguay for AP and as the political and economic situation in Argentina was getting worse, they brought me over to Buenos Aires on the 8^th December in order to help with the coverage. As the days passed the situation got worse until the looting and cacerolazos (protests where people banged pots) began, and the president fell.

The coverage was hard because we worked a lot – we got up very early and worked until very late. It lasted almost a month and a half.

Is there a difference between taking pictures in your own country, and others?

For me there is no difference because if someone is suffering it doesn’t matter to me what nationality they are.

Can you ever see yourself coming back to Argentina?

Not for the moment.

What, if anything, do you miss?

My family and some friends.

You began your career as a staff photographer on La Nación – how was your experience there? 

It was great because it was my first job and at that time I had no previous experience, so it allowed me to have a lot of contact with photographers who had already been working for a long time. So it was an apprenticeship, and I learned as I worked.

What do you remember most from your travels round Peru, Bolivia, Brazil and Chile?

Before that trip my only travels outside of the country had been to New York, so the reason I decided to do this trip was to be able to get to know more about other countries that were closer to Argentina than the US.

What I got out of the trip was that it allowed me to meet a great deal of people and it helped me to lose my shyness when interacting with other people.

Did this time open up more doors for you?

At the end of the trip, when I was in Bolivia, I made friends with the Associated
Press (AP) photographer there. When they transferred him to El Salvador it gave me the opportunity to work temporarily for AP in Bolivia, and then later they contracted me to work as permanent staff in Paraguay.

When I worked on La Nación I also had contacts in AP because from time to time I took some photos of football and of demonstrations for them.

Your pictures are very natural – how do you get people’s trust? In particular in your series on transvestite prostitutes in Paraguay, how did you get them to feel comfortable with you?

You get people to confide in you by being clear with them about what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it, and why. Also, spending time with people and having empathy is fundamental.

There is one picture which shows a prostitute with a client…how did you get them to agree to have their photo taken?

That was one of the last photos that I took as part of this project because I needed to spend time, almost a year and a half, for them to be able to trust that I wasn’t going to play dirty in taking that photo.

Do you ever feel like a voyeur?

No, never.

The content of many of your images is very strong – do you ever feel traumatised by the situations you record? Does it keep you awake at night?

They are situations that you never forget and on some occasions you have flashbacks, but they don’t torment me.

Do you find that many media don’t want to print such strong pictures?

Yes, especially when they are photos of people from countries from the North. If the people that appear in those images are from impoverished countries, there’s not such a problem publishing them.

Much of the European press will rarely publish photos of dead people. When do you think it is necessary to print such pictures? Is it ethical?

I think that what is unethical is that people die for things that could be avoided. And often they don’t publish the photos as they don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable. In reality, if they used the photos well it would mean that those people would not only feel uncomfortable, but also become involved.

For more information on Walter’s work, visit www.walterastrada.com