Into the Heart of Resistance

Into the Heart of Resistance
The Take | Andres D’Elia
The Take | Andres D’Elia
“TO SEARCH FOR THE GOOD AND MAKE IT MATTER: THAT IS THE REAL
CHALLENGE FOR THE ARTIST. NOT SIMPLY TO TRANSFORM IDEAS OR
REVELATIONS INTO MATTER, BUT TO MAKE THOSE REVELATIONS
ACTUALLY MATTER.”– Estella Conwill Majozo
By Noelle Elia
You might not expect The Take, the brave, new
documentary by journalists and political activists
AviLewis and Naomi Klein, to be a love letter, but it
is—a deeply felt and sincerely composed one to
their fellow compañeros. While the film is a lucid
critique of capitalism’s myriad wrongdoings and
deals with complicated socio-economic and political
issues, which under the name of globalization have
radicalized millions around the world, it is primarily
a message of hope. What makes it riveting is that it
brings to light profoundly human stories that
transcend the clichés of globalization. Lewis and
Klein have given this complex reality a human face:
people fighting for their right to work in financially
devastated Argentina.
The relationship of art to social change has a
long and varied history. As the renowned theorist
Herbert Marcuse recognized, the possibility of
human liberation lies in our belief in the
imagination. Picasso painted Guernica in reaction
to the Spanish Civil War; the Brazilian martial art
capoeira was originally cloaked as dance during
slavery times in the 17th Century; in the 60s,
musicians wrote popular songs protesting the
Vietnam War. These days, agit-prop art is more
media savvy than ever. Political documentaries are
exploding, mirroring a collective urgency to dig
deeper into the truth, past cynicism and
indifference.
Avi Lewis, the film’s director and co-producer, has
years of experience in the media. In the mid-90s, he
hosted a hip, informative TV show called The New
Music, and often found ways to infuse politics into
the stories. He went on to host a national, primetime
talk show, counterSpin, moderating over 500 political
debates in three years. Now, he’s put himself on the
other side of the camera, adding a new dimension to
his activism. “There’s a distance and scrutiny that’s
introduced when you look at a phenomenon through
the lens of a camera,” he comments. “Zooming in
and figuring out how to piece together a story in
filmic terms allowed me to see from a different kind
of perspective.”
Naomi Klein, The Take’s writer and coproducer,
is the author of No Logo: Taking Aim at
Brand Bullies, an acclaimed best seller, translated
into 27 languages. She’s a regular contributor to
such influential publications as The Nation, The
Guardian and The New York Times. Even during
The Take’s lengthy shoot, she continued writing—
16 columns in 8 months—which amazed Lewis:
“the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq
both happened while we were in Argentina, so
Naomi never left that track of her work. I frankly
don’t know how she does it.”
Toronto is their home base. Klein and Lewis live
in an ethnically diverse, downtown neighbourhood,
across from an elementary school, close to markets
The Take | Andres D’Elia
4POINT OF VIEW 55 | 2004

and a community centre. A classic Toronto
Victorian on the outside, a think-tank in the inside.
Their assistant greets me and offers some green tea
while I peruse their extensive bookshelves—lots of
world literature, cultural theory and philosophy.
Propped against a wall is a painting of the film’s
poster, a gift from their international sales agent,
Celluloid Dreams. The house feels uncluttered, fine
for clear thinking.
I had met Avi Lewis earlier in the year just
before their film’s world premiere at Hot Docs.
What struck me about him then, and now as he
enters the room, is Lewis’ great enthusiasm—he’s
full of facts and information—while his manner is
warm and easygoing. Naomi, he tells me, will join
us soon; she’s smack dab in the middle of breaking
a major story for the U.S. press, concerning dark
secrets and shady dealings of former Secretary of
State James Baker. One can only imagine what the
breakfast conversations are like around here.
The Take is being released at a time when
documentaries have become wildly popular in the
mainstream, yet funding and making them in
Canada remains an uphill challenge. From
government cuts to record numbers of emerging
filmmakers all vying for the same, small slice of the
production pie, the times they aren’t yet a-changin’.
Lewis spent a year convincing the NFB and CBC
that Canadians would care about the film. “I’ll
confess that I thought it was going to be easy for us
because we both occupy fairly prominent places in
the media world,” comments Lewis. But, “we went
through the whole process that everybody goes
through—various stages of interrogation and
inquisitions. I was treated like a first time
filmmaker over and over again and that wasn’t
fun.” Rounding out the financing was Torontobased
Barna-Alper Productions.
Naomi Klein appears, cell phone in hand, and
joins us at the large harvest table in their dining
room. She’s gracious, even a touch shy. I’m curious
about their motivation in putting themselves into the
film, both on camera and as narrators, because, for
me, it upped the emotional ante. “When a filmmaker
is narrating a film, I want to know a little bit about
where they’re coming from,” Klein explains. “Trying
to be an absent, neutral narrator would have felt
more dishonest than to say, ‘look, this is who we are,
this is where we come from, this is what brought us
here. We feel this is the next stage of the globalization
discussion and it’s an answer to the question we’ve
posed, so check it out.’”
As a genre, point-of-view documentaries allow
Canadian directors to make films in other countries
and still fulfill the Canadian content requirements.
“There are a lot of routes to the goal,” comments
Lewis. “And I think we needed to go somewhere
else and find a place in the world where something
really exciting was happening and bring that
excitement home.” In response to what they call
‘the new impatience,’ activists seeking out positive
alternatives, Lewis and Klein traveled to Argentina
Taking The Take to Festivals & Co-ops
THE TAKE HAS SCREENED AT MANY FESTIVALS, ACTIVIST
GATHERINGS AND WORKER CO-OPS AROUND THE WORLD,
AND THE REACTIONS HAVE BEEN STRONG, BOTH POLITICALLY
AND EMOTIONALLY. It’s opening night of DOXA, Vancouver’s
documentary film and video festival. At a downtown theatre that’s
practically an extinct breed of velvet grandeur and yesteryear elegance,
people are swarming the entrance. Unlike most Canadian cities,‘green’
politics are more integrated into daily life here, and the energy is high.
Several local politicians are on hand to introduce the film and they’re
greeted with rounds of applause, as are Lewis and Klein.
The audience seems to act collectively, bracing itself during emotionally
charged moments when human dignity butts up against police hostility.
There are boos and hisses right on cue when the smug owner of Zanon is
interviewed, or when Menem appears, oozing insincerity and self-interest.
Everyone cheers when the Forja workers triumph in their court case and are
allowed to re-open the plant themselves. After a rowdy standing ovation,
questions and comments fly from all around: people want to engage,
communicate, and share. As they spill out of the theatre, emotions are
running high; the crowd is both energized and activated. Avi Lewis tells me
this happens after every screening.
This past summer, The Canadian Worker Co-op Federation expressed
interest in screening The Take at their annual meeting in Moncton, New
Brunswick, where members from around the country congregate. It’s a
great idea because, as Lewis says,“a film can travel places where a union
organizer can’t.”What they’re noticing is that, while worker co-ops in
Canada have been around since the early 60s, there’s resurgence
happening for exactly the same reasons as in Argentina, but playing out
in very different ways. Here, the economy is still resource-based. There
are logging, pulp and paper, and fish canning co-ops springing up all over
the country in environmentally sustainable, community-based ways.
Groups “are incredibly excited about what the film is going to bring in
terms of the co-op model in the Canadian public imagination. And it’s
right here in our backyard.”
2004 | POINT OF VIEW 55 5

The Take | Andres D’Elia
The Take | Andres D’Elia
The Take | Andres D’Elia
Noelle Elia is a street-wise
synthesist and purveyor of the
positive. Au courant: doc on a
Toronto 'human landmark' and
personal hero named Franco.
following rumours of an emerging worker co-op
movement. This was not armchair activism—they
moved down there for 8 months and immersed
themselves in the upheaval.
“This is Argentina, but it could be anywhere. A
rich country made poor. Welcome to the globalized
ghost town.” So begins The Take. In the early 90s,
Argentina appeared to be a poster child of progress
and economic growth, but festering beneath all that
shiny foreign investment was a crumbling system fed
on corruption and greed. By 1999, it had all collapsed,
throwing the county into anarchy and despair.
In The Take, we meet people from three
factories who have risen up, taking power into
their own hands. They represent different facets of
the country’s struggle for renewal. Brukman’s suit
factory was the first operation to be occupied,
taken over by its seamstresses; it has since become
the “beloved symbol of Argentina’s new politics.”
Brukman’s is an “activist mecca” where meetings
take place during the day around sewing machines,
and at night, there are concerts outside the
factory’s gates. One woman sums it up with
troubling irony: “For us as workers, accounting is
easy. I don’t know why it’s so hard for the bosses to
pay salaries, buy materials and pay the bills—you
add and subtract.”
We meet Maty, a new co-op member at the
Zanon ceramic tile factory, which has been under
worker control for the past few years. She is young,
in her 20s, and represents the movement’s next
generation. Zanon is rooted in the community on
many levels: donating tiles to neighbouring
hospitals and schools. Popular rock bands have
written songs in support of Zanon.
If there's a protagonist in the film, an
unsuspecting hero, it would have to be Freddy, a
factory worker and family man. When his Forja
auto-parts plant shuts down, he and his co-workers
band together, and decide to organize. Forja is the
new kid on the block—Brukman and Zanon have
turned before—and it is through Freddy that we
have the opportunity to witness the step-by-step
process by which a movement is born. We see
council meetings and community networking
sessions, demonstrations in the streets, and
intimate family gatherings where financial
concerns are part of the daily conversation. These
sequences are eerily juxtaposed with the upcoming
presidential election and short-lived resurrection of
Carlos Menem, the former President of Argentina,
who brought the country into prosperity and then
poverty in the 90s.
While in Buenos Aires, Naomi Klein and Avi
Lewis lived collectively in a group of nine. She
explains that, “it was an adventure we were all
on together. An experiment and a moment of
people living in Argentina because we believed in
what people were trying to do there, and we
wanted to be a part of it and we wanted to learn
from it.” As a group, Lewis and Klein and the
others would brainstorm about how to illustrate
ideas in the film: for instance, a whole day was
spent on critiquing the IMF (International
Monetary Fund). They also watched political
documentaries together, like Life and Debt and
The Revolution Will Not be Televised, and
discussed what worked and what didn’t. “Not
everybody brought the same politics to the
project,” says Lewis. “Some of the people had
really strong feelings about consensual decisionmaking
and horizontal organizing. Of course
these are themes in the film, but it (the directing
process) was not a democracy. Ideologically they
had a really good point, but practically, (I was
the) director.” As first-time filmmakers, Lewis and
Klein were learning on the job, just like Freddy
and the boys at the Forja.
6POINT OF VIEW 55 | 2004

One of the most poignant sequences in the
film occurs when the workers and their families
celebrate their legislative victory against the
Forja’s owner with a fiesta. While Freddy,
endearingly off-key, attempts to sing a popular
Mercedes Sosa song, we see Avi Lewis and Naomi
Klein sharing a quiet moment. Then the scene
shifts, and Sosa’s hauntingly beautiful voice is
heard over images of a brutal confrontation with
police outside the Brukman factory. That
Brukman could once again be vulnerable
underscores how tenuous the movement is, and
yet how vital it is to carry on: “Who said that all is
lost? I come to offer my heart--it won’t be easy,
but it will pass. It won’t be as simple as I first
thought, like opening one’s chest and pulling out
one’s soul—like a stab of love.”
Making a film like The Take requires a kind of
emotional stamina, and I can’t help but wonder
how Lewis and Klein stay committed. Avi Lewis
admits that’s “a deep and impossible question to
answer. It’s a matter of identity. For better or
worse, Naomi and I are both political animals and
policy wonks. The excitement in this household
when a 75-page deal memo comes in that
implicated the Carlyle Group and the Albright
Group about a huge conflict of interest around the
selling of debt between Iraq and Kuwait—it was
electric around here.”
For most people, it’s all too easy to distance
themselves from what is—to deny that harsh
realities might be careening faster and faster
toward home plate. In South Africa there’s a word,
ubuuntu, which poetically describes the very
essence of being human: knowing that a person is
a person through other persons, that we are
interconnected and that we belong to one
another. “What could be more global,” suggests
Lewis, “than a couple of Canadians going down to
these post-industrial neighbourhoods in Argentina
and seeing the seeds of their own possible
future?” For him, The Take is about “the future of
our (Klein’s and Lewis’) activism and a cautionary
tale of where our own country is headed if we
keep going down this particular economic path.”
Speaking of The Take and both her work and
Avi’s, Naomi Klein comments: “Give people ideas,
that’s all we can do.” There’s an irrefutable unity
between who Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein are as
people, as activists, and as filmmakers. “As an
activist who is fundamentally driven by politics
and rage against the machine, and love and
admiration for people who resist in creative and
constructive ways,” states Lewis, “all I can do is
keep prying myself open at each stage to figure
out what I can actually learn from any one
experience that will inform the next creative
decision.” The circularity of Avi Lewis’ comment
is fascinating—it’s an amalgam of their lives, and
mirrors each stage of their creative process.
Learning as they go, discovering what is needed,
and always moving forward. POV
An Activist Film Release
FROM THE YEARS NAOMI KLEIN SPENT PROMOTING NO
LOGO, SHE LEARNED A LOT ABOUT WHAT NOT TO DO, WHEN
RELEASING A CULTURAL PRODUCT. Being in a different place every
day left her drained and exhausted, with no time to learn about the
communities she was in.“We’re not asking local activists just to sell our
film,” she points out,“we’re also supporting the work they’re doing, as
well as supporting the audience that comes out. The first thing they
want to know is,‘What can I do?’‚ And there are groups right there for
them to connect with.”This reflects the essence of their parallel
distribution strategy.
Lewis and Klein have attracted Canada’s largest distributor, Odeon,
who signed onto the idea of having activist fundraisers in every city a
few of days before the film opens.“We’re using the film as a launching
point for discussion with all the frontline activists we can reach, about
how they can apply (the ideas in The Take) in their own struggle,”
explains Lewis. And since a strong opening weekend is crucial to a film’s
shelf-life, they hope to build momentum through word of mouth:
appealing to their core audience, people already invested in the subject
matter, who will spark interest in the mainstream, multiplex audience.
The grassroots promotional campaign was developed with Good
Company, who successfully marketed another important Canadian
political documentary, The Corporation. Like that film, a website has
been developed which is a hub for activist movements. The site,
http://www.nfb.ca/thetake/ is definitely worth the trip.
For Klein,“It’s a nice moment of uncertainty in the film industry
that’s allowed for a little bit of oxygen. People are not totally set on a
pattern that has to be followed and that’s allowing us to say,‘here’s a
different recipe, let’s try it.’ And hey, the Carlyle Group hasn’t bought all
the theatres in Canada yet!”
2004 | POINT OF VIEW 55 7