Stir Cheat Sheet: 5 speakers pursuing social justice to catch at KDocsFF

Joel Bakan, Alexander von Bismarck among those taking part in talks at the 2021 virtual documentary-film festival

By Gail johnson

Joel Bakan co-wrote and -directed The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel.

CENTRED SQUARELY on social justice, KDocsFF places as much emphasis on talks as it does on documentary screenings themselves. It’s all happening online this year, with keynote addresses as well as several panel discussions and Q&As. Access is available anytime throughout the fest, which runs to March 21.

Here are five speakers to catch.

#1

Camila Freitas, Chão (Landless)

Freitas is a Rio de Janeiro-based filmmaker who studied film at Universidade Federal Fluminense and cinematography at Louis Lumière Film School in Paris and who’s currently working on a Master’s degree in visual arts at the School of Fine Arts of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She filmed Chão over a four-year period to accompany the Landless Workers Movement’s activism to promote land reform in Central Brazil. She has described the land issue as a wound of colonialism, one that has justified violence against the landless over time, including police violence and mass murders; consider the Eldorado dos Carajás massacre in 1996, when 21 landless workers were killed by the police in the southeast state of Pará.

#2

Joel Bakan, The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel

Bakan follows up the award-winning The Corporation with The New Corporation (written and co-directed with Jennifer Abbott), uncovering how so many corporate entities are slyly rebranding themselves as socially conscious organizations. It sheds light on the growing global resistance to corporate power, with people taking to the streets to restore justice and protect the planet’s future. A professor of law at UBC who has worked on landmark legal cases, Bakan has law degrees from Oxford, Dalhousie, and Harvard. His 2004 book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power was published in over 20 languages.

#3

Alexander von Bismarck, Wood

Yes, it’s that von Bismarck: Alexander is the Iron Chancellor's great-great-great-nephew, and he’s on a mission to create political and public awareness of the devastating consequences of forest depletion and illegal logging. As head of the Environmental Investigation Agency in Washington, he’s part detective, changing his appearance and persona at times to bring corrupt activities to light. The film by Monica Lăzurean-Gorgan, Michaela Kirst, and Ebba Sinzinger sheds light on “game-changers undercover”.

#4

David France, Welcome to Chechnya

In the repressive Russian republic of Chechnya, people who identify as LGBTQ+ face persecution. This film goes to great lengths to protect the anonymity of activists who work undercover to rescue victims and provide them with safe houses and visa assistance. France is an investigative reporter and nonfiction author who has been nominated for Academy awards (How to Survive a Plague, based on his book How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS, and The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson).

#5

Geraldine Pratt, Overseas

Pratt is Canada Research Chair in Transnationalism and Precarious Labour and head of the geography department at UBC. Overseas tells the story of women in the Philippines who get deployed abroad to work as domestic workers or nannies, often leaving their own children behind. They’re heading into the unknown, sometimes only to face abuses in their new home. Filmmaker Sung A-Yoon spends time at one of the many training centers dedicated to domestic work where women do role-playing exercises, as employee and employer, to help them navigate their uncertain future.

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