The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

Achbar settled down on to the grass to share his new film, The Corporation, with its first
audience/public. As the co-director of Canada’s second-top-grossing feature film puts it:
“It doesn’t get more grassroots than that.” (Personal Interview, Achbar, 2007) Achbar
wanted “his people” – activists and artists – to see the film first, and where they saw it
was of utmost importance. Screening a three-hour documentary about the negative
qualities of big business inside a rain forest at a rave may seem like frivolous treatment of
d/e for such a serious text, but this event is at the heart of grassroots, community-oriented
d/e practices. Achbar was contributing to the construction of a counterpublic – where
people had gathered to communicate, express, and create outside of a mainstream
paradigm. Both the (sub)cultural context of embedding this screening inside a rave, as
well as the unorthodox physical location of the screening feed into Fraser’s conceptual
framework of counterpublics. Following Fraser’s line of thinking on publics and
counterpublics, this rave screening, and others that followed it, contribute to articulations
of community who lack the access to dominant, mediated publics.
Connecting to a social “movement” and various counterpublics were always the
intentions behind the marketing, distribution and exhibition of The Corporation, while
Achbar and business partner Katherine Dodds also had a “longtail” goal for the film that
would exploit the buzz initiated by the margins, in order to eventually pique the interests
of the mainstream. Achbar puts it this way: “As grassroots diminishes, mainstream
increases.” (Ibid) And so the multiple purpose of such grassroots d/e events becomes
clearer: they serve to build counterpublics and contribute to social movements, as setting
the stage for wider success and dissemination. The aforementioned Breaking New
Ground report agrees: “The West Coast rave [resulted in] an underground buzz, which
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