Printable Version
Review by Rick Kisonak
An
independent review by noted film critic Rick
Kisonak (Salon.com and other online
venues).
FINDING OUR VOICES:
STORIES OF AMERICAN
DISSENT
Huntington, Vermont producer
(and former NBC Nightly News
production
manager) Holly Stadtler has
managed something eminences the likes
of
Errol Morris (Standard
Operating Procedure) and Phil Donahue (Body
of
War) had zero luck pulling
off this past year: She's made a movie
about
the Bush administration's
moronic mishandling of the Iraq invasion
even
war doc weary audiences will
want to see.
Finding Our Voices, to
be honest, doesn't benefit from the
glitziest
marketing, poster art or
main menu design (if you happen to watch it
on
DVD screener) I've ever come
across but what awaits the viewer
beyond
these preliminaries is
moviemaking of the highest caliber and
a
perspective on the Baghdad
imbroglio I at any rate haven't
seen
represented on film
before.
On the sixth anniversary of
the war's start, Stadtler and
writer-director Victoria
Hughes offer an in-depth chronicle of
this
country's resistance
movement, a movement most in this country
until
now probably
won't have realized
existed on any sort of
nationwide,
organized level. They
provide a compelling account of a diverse
group
of citizens who have
demonstrated, petitioned and risked jail
time-not
to mention their livelihood
and very lives-in order to demand
accountability from leaders,
something the filmmakers point out
the
mainstream media has failed
miserably to do.
The picture portrays the
movement against the invasion through
the
stories of eight
individuals, each of which is guaranteed to
lose you
at least a night's sleep, as
well as the larger context of
civil
protest and the pivotal role
it's played in the nation's evolution
as
the founders of the country
intended it to do.
While all are articulate
people of conscience, three of the
film's
subjects stand out to me. At
first glance, Adele Welty would appear
to
be an unlikely enemy of the
state. Arrested during a protest on
Capitol
grounds, she's 66, a
grandmother and wouldn't look out of place at
a
church bake sale. She lost
her son, a firefighter, on 9/11
(Welty
watched the buildings
collapse on him from her office a few
blocks
away) and in time came to
the conclusion that "the best legacy I
could
build for Timmy would be one
of peace, to try to stop any more
innocent
civilians from being
killed."
She shares the unforgettable
story of traveling to Iraq as part of
a
delegation to
provide medical supplies.
"We were all on atrocity
overload," she relates.
"One evening I asked a group of Iraqis?"What
do
you do to decompress, to
relax?" They said, "When there's
electricity,
we watch television. We love
Seinfeld." "In the recreation halls
of
our army bases", she points
out, "our soldiers sit and watch
Seinfeld.
They're all laughing. And in
the morning, when the sun comes up,
they
start killing each
other."
There's U.S. Representative
Jim Moran (D-VA), one of the minority
of
Congress members to oppose
the Iraq War from the beginning. Where
were
the others, the film asks by
implication, when he was publicly
debunking the
administration's premise for an invasion "the
mythical
link between the terrorist
attacks and Saddam's regime?" This has
been
the worst foreign policy
fiasco in American history," he charged,
"Now
we're being told we're going
to Iraq to fight Al Qaeda. There were
no
Al Qaeda in Iraq when we
went into Iraq. Saddam had nothing to do
with
9/11".
We hear from soldiers who
were there and witnessed firsthand
the
arrogance and folly of the
White House. Former Sgt. John Bruhns,
for
example, speaks eloquently
about why he volunteered and the
appalling
pinheadedness of
Bush-Rumsfeld policies. Bruhns lost a close
friend on
9/11. He
wanted to take action against the evildoers his
government
told him were responsible,
Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Instead, he
found
himself taking action
against ordinary Iraqis.
"We were fighting just the
people who live there. Go house to
house,
kick down the door. Do this
two to three nights a week in two or
three
communities, they're not
feeling liberated; they're feeling occupied.
I
know if anybody came into
this country and kicked down my front
door,
they'd have to fight me to
the death."
"I was on active duty", he
reflects," speaking out against the war.
I'm
proud of my military
service. I'm not proud of the Iraq War. I
was
personally hurt to find that
every reason I was given to go to war
with
that country was
false."
Finding Our Voices is
splendidly edited, narrated by Martin Sheen
with
his customary finesse and
authority and written with a
terrific
historical grasp. Hughes
instructively compares early,
unpopular
resistance to the Iraq War
to controversial uprisings from the
Boston
Tea Party and that of the
suffragettes through the civil
rights
movement and argues
passionately for the vital importance of
civil
protest. "Without dissent
there is no debate," the filmmaker
asserts.
"Without debate, there is no
democracy. In a democracy you
cannot
afford to forget that each
voice matters."
In the early
days now of a new administration
committed to
correcting
the mistakes of the last and
repairing the damage done to this
country's standing, Finding
Our Voices leaves little doubt as to
the
debt owed to a relatively
few brave Americans who, when it wasn't
quite
as fashionable or safe as it
is now to do so, dared to raise
theirs.