Nexus of Film & Activism in Kampala

(Delighted to welcome back IntLawGrrls alumna and filmmaker Pamela Yates, who contributes this guest post to IntLawGrrls' series on the ICC Kampala Conference)

At Skylight Pictures we (Peter Kinoy, Paco de Onís, and I) spend a lot of time thinking about ways to heighten the impact of our films in order to increase awareness of human rights and justice issues. For over 25 years we’ve been committed to the art of storytelling through the language of cinema – lush cinematography, music woven in to enhance the narrative, thoughtful editing that seamlessly transports the viewer through time and space – in the belief that it will bring audiences to a deeper level of engagement.
In recent years, as social media tools have proliferated, we have adapted many of them to our mission. An example is the international justice Twitter feed on the IJCentral map, about which I blogged in this IntLawGrrls post.
But because much of our outreach work is in developing countries, we also produce lo-tech projects designed to engage audiences on the ground, for whom traveling through cyberspace is not an option.
And that’s the reason that Skylight's at the International Criminal Court Review Conference in Kampala, with 1,000 Screening Kits of our film The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court (prior IntLawGrrls posts here and here) -- to give out free of charge to civil society organizations, to country delegations, and to the press. (Thanks to generous support from Humanity United and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.) The Kits are in English and French, and include:
► The Reckoning (60-minute version)
► ICC and Africa (20-minute film)
► Peace & Justice (20-minute film)
► Screening/Discussion Guide
► Audience Survey Form
► FAQs about the ICC
The impetus to make the Screening Kits came from 180 African civil society organizations that banded together and signed a petition to protest the 2009 declaration (available here) by the African Union (logo at right) of non-cooperation with the ICC with regard to the arrest warrant it issued for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. While the international press focused on the AU declaration and its critique of the ICC, the pushback against impunity coming from the civil society organizations wasn’t getting any attention. The latter organisations were saying that the AU wasn’t offering the victims any justice alternative to the ICC -- that it was effectively declaring Africa an “impunity zone”. They wanted to raise public awareness of how the ICC works and how it operates as a court of last resort.
So we reached out to these organisations to see if we could produce a media tool they could use to increase awareness of the role that the ICC can play in the battle against impunity. In coordination with Pivot Pictures, a media initiative of the International Center for Transitional Justice, we coordinated with the ICTJ country offices in Kenya, Uganda, Morocco, and South Africa to work out what materials and themes to include in the Kit. After a period of exchanging ideas and getting feedback from the civil society organizations on 2 short films that we produced for the project, we arrived at the menu listed above. Now those organisations will receive their Screening Kits and go forth to use them – we’ve created an online Screening Report form for the them to use, so that we may track the use of the Kits and the impact they are having.
The Kampala ICC Review Conference is an extraordinary opportunity to have massive impact with The Reckoning and a range of short films and microdocs we produced about international justice themes. We will be screening all this material non-stop at the RC Media Centre, and we also have several screenings planned at the People’s Space, where civil society organizations from around the world are gathered this 2 weeks in order to discuss the ICC. The Kampala theatrical Premiere of The Reckoning was at Watoto Church yesterday, and there will be a national broadcast on UBC, Ugandan national television, today.
And watch for our video blogs at the RC Media Centre. They'll be posted daily at IJCentral.

Go On! ICC Deputy Prosecutor Bensouda to give Women's Day address in California

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia and other events of interest) It's an immense honor to announce the 1st-ever trip to California of the 2d-in-command at the Office of the Prosecution, International Criminal Court: ICC Deputy Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda (left and below right)will visit the home institutions of 2 IntLawGrrls, Beth Van Schaack and me, next week:
► On International Women's Day, the California International Law Center at King Hall, University of California, Davis, School of Law, for which I serve as founding Director, will host Bensouda's address on "Gender Violence and International Criminal Law" from 5 to 7 p.m. Monday, March 8, in our Moot Courtroom. Introducing her will be California Superior Court Judge Ramona J. Garrett, a 1980 King Hall alumna. Joining me in leading Q&A after the address will be California-Berkeley Law Professor David D. Caron, who's also President-Elect of the American Society of International Law.
► On the following day, Tuesday, March 9, from 12 noon to 1 p.m., Bensouda will speak at Santa Clara University School of Law. Details here.
Bensouda will discuss her work investigating and prosecuting persons accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes -- ranging from sexual violence to forced recruitment of child soldiers -- in wartorn places like Darfur, Democratic Republic Congo, Central African Republic, Guinea, and Uganda. Interviews with Bensouda about this work were featured (right) in The Reckoning (2009) (prior posts here and here), the documentary by IntLawGrrl guest/alumna Pamela Yates.
Before joining the ICC in 2004, Bensouda served as the Attorney General in her native country of The Gambia. She played key roles in negotiations at the United Nations and at the Economic Community of West African States. Bensouda's long advocacy for the rights of women led human rights groups to applaud her ICC appointment.
We're most grateful for support from the Planethood Foundation, established by Donald Ferencz, son of Nuremberg Prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz, to aid programs that promote international criminal justice.
Hope to see you at one of these events!

Guest Blogger: Pamela Yates

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Pamela Yates (right) as today's guest blogger.
Pamela's a cofounder of Skylight Pictures, Inc., and the director of Skylight's most recent production: The Reckoning, a feature-length film on the International Criminal Court that's subject of IntLawGrrls posts posted here and here by Lucy Reed and yours truly.
Recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and a member of the Director’s Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America, Pamela has been involved in many film projects in addition to The Reckoning. Examples: producer, Loss of Innocence, winner of an Emmy; director, When the Mountains Tremble, winner of a Sundance award; Executive Producer, Witness to War, winner of an Academy Award; director, State of Fear (2005) (below left), which relied on findings of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission to depict the counterterrorism campaign that lasted 2 decades in Peru; director, Presumed Guilty, a PBS special about public defenders in San Francisco; producer, director, and co-author, Cause for Murder, about the lives and deaths of 2 young Mexican lawyers; producer and director, Brotherhood of Hate, about violent white supremacy movements; and producer and director with Skylight colleague Peter Kinoy of Living Broke in Boom Times, a trilogy about poor peoples’ movements in America.
In addition to all these achievements, Pamela directed what is thought to be the first music video made in China. No More Disguises, featuring troubajor Ciu Jian, filmed in Tianamen Square at the dawn of the democracy movement, was named by Rolling Stone as one of the 10 best music videos of 1989 and had its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival’s opening night.
In her guest post below, Pamela reports on IJCentral, the online global social network on through which she and her colleagues continue to rally their audience 'round the cause of international justice.
Heartfelt welcome!

Social network on international justice

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for this opportunity to guest post on our online efforts to enhance global understanding of human rights)

Making the film The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court wasn’t enough.
There had to be a way to take the members of a general audience, newly introduced to the idea of the International Criminal Court via the emotional journey in the film, and make them part of a growing movement for international justice.
At Skylight Pictures, where we have been making films about human rights and the quest for justice for 25-plus years, this is always part of our thinking while in production:
► What do we want people to do afterwards?
► How can we make our films engage, educate and increase understanding of human rights amongst the public at large and policy makers, contributing to informed decisions on issues of social change and the public good?
The Reckoning film, on which IntLawGrrls posted here and here, is the flagship in a 3-year outreach campaign and educational initiative meant to drive new constituents to the international justice movement. (You can join the 10,000 others who've already taken advantage of free online viewing here, and/or purchase the and DVD here.) As a complement, we've created a place that these new audiences can go to after seeing the film: IJCentral, an information resource and social network for global justice. Depicted at the top of this post, the IJCentral site was launched at the world premiere of The Reckoning during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival this past January. Today the site joins IntLawGrrls' "connections..." list in the column at right.
IJCentral implements a multi-platform citizen engagement strategy, using online mapping technology to visualize a global social network for international justice. It aggregates blogs, videos, SMS text messaging, media modules created from The Reckoning footage, Twitter and Facebook, e-mail listserve groups, news feeds, and photo feeds, taking advantage of a range of Web 2.0 social bookmarking applications available online. Making use of mobile phones, the world’s most widely distributed communications platform, Twitter and FrontlineSMS text-messaging technology is incorporated into the map. This allows activists, victims, educators, students and other members of the network to upload SMS text messages to the map -- already, you can see a global conversation about justice appears as geo-located pop-ups on that map.
IJCentral is a work in progress, with constant improvements in access, reach, and innovation. As it accumulates content from users, IJCentral will become an invaluable resource and database for human rights advocates and international justice activists around the world. An array of strategic stakeholder partners with worldwide reach will be accessible through IJCentral, including the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, the umbrella for 2,500 NGOs non-governmental organizations around the world actively working to achieve universal ratification of the ICC, and the American Society of International Law.
Other aspects of our 3-year outreach campaign, all of which will be available free online:
► Multiple language versions of The Reckoning. We now have English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Depending on our fundraising efforts, Swahili, Arabic, Luo, and Russian are next.
► In-depth educational modules for classroom use, each 10 to 15 minutes in length. The first 3 modules, produced with Facing History and Ourselves are “The Creation of the ICC,” “Peace and Justice” (as played out in Uganda), and “The ICC and Darfur” (the problem of enforcement).
► Micro-docs, 3-minute shorts that bring the role of the victim into places where victims might not be able to go themselves, such as international justice conferences.

Look On! "Reckoning" on the ICC

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy films.) Stay home for the national television premiere on Tuesday night, 14 July – or better yet, host a gathering. Or, if you're in Washington, D.C., go to the event sponsored by the American Society of International Law the night before. Whatever you do, do see “The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court” on PBS. You can find the details for all these viewing options in Diane's post below. In this post, I'll focus on the film itself.
I’ve just previewed "The Reckoning" on DVD, courtesy of director Pamela Yates (below left) -- who contacted me after seeing my January Look On! post about another Sundance Film Festival selection, Lisa F. Jackson's "The Greatest Silence." So I can vouch for the impact of this new film.
It will have you on the edge of your seat, following two simultaneous dramas – the Court’s first investigations and prosecutions of unspeakable crimes, and the Court’s own struggle to survive. It opens with the unduckable question:

Does humanity have the possibility of doing better than this?

The film then moves back and forth between killing fields, Nuremberg, Rome, The Hague, Uganda, Congo, Colombia, Darfur. Ninety minutes goes very, very quickly.
In her Filmmaker’s Statement, after describing the Court itself as the protagonist in "The Reckoning," Yates tells us:

The title 'The Reckoning' has three meanings: the reckoning of a world trying to bring the worst perpetrators of massive crimes to justice; the reckoning of the International Criminal Court becoming an effective global arbiter of justice; and the reckoning with the international community – do we have the political will to carry out the arrest warrants and fulfill the mandate of this new Court?

You will see many familiar and not-so-familiar faces: Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Deputy Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda (on whom I've posted before), Benjamin B. Ferencz of Planethood Foundation (which helps fund the American Society of International Law’s Helton Fellows in human rights), former Bronx prosecutor Christine H. Chung, now back practicing law in the United States, and John Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
Kudos to the documentary filmmakers – director Yates, Producer Paco de Onís and editor Peter Kinoy, all of Skylight Pictures – as well as cinematographer Melle van Essen.

Look On! View the ICC film "The Reckoning" in D.C. Monday, on television Tuesday

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy films.) No doubt IntLawGrrl Lucy Reed is not the only one of us who's already had the opportunity to view "The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court." This coming week all of us will have the chance to see the documentary reviewed in Lucy's post above:

► On Monday, July 13, the documentary will be shown at 7:30 p.m. at the National Press Club, Murrow Room, 13th Floor, 529 14th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. A number of international law experts then will lead a discussion at this American Society of International Law event. Details and registration here.

► On Tuesday, July 14 (check time in your area here), the documentary will have its national television premiere on the Public Broadcasting Service program P.O.V.

As director Pamela Yates (pictured in Lucy's post above) explains here, she, along with producer Paco de Onís and editor Peter Kinoy, set out to tell the story of the ICC and its efforts. One focus, as described here and as depicted in this trailer, is on events leading to the indictment of Sudan President Omar al-Bashir for atrocities in Darfur.

P.O.V. also includes a link here for watching the film online from this Wednesday, July 15, through August 13. And the DVD can be purchased here.

One way or another, check it out.