I went to a screening of a short documentary the other night. The director, a filmmaker and college professor here in town, invited me with some friends to check out a rough cut of his documentary on children in Uganda. The documentary covers the story of rebel forces who kidnap children and force them into service.
The entire film is a short 31 minutes. The interviews are withdrawn, the memories shared are vague. To add depth and texture to narrations like “They kidnapped us, they took us back to the village and forced us to kill people we knew,” the director shows drawings made by children in the rehabilitation center
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I like to think it doesn’t have to be an either-or thing—the cause OR the art. But maybe I’m just an idealist. It seems, though, that in our culture we’re guilty of trying to get to the point too quickly and too concretely. We want to “tell” everything rather than “show” it. As a result, people come to either expect and demand that things be clearly spelled out for them, or they just resent it and shut it out. Neither response is good for the cause, it seems. I think it’s the responsibility of the artist/filmmaker to place viewers in sometimes uncomfortable places in order to push them toward a new, deeper way of seeing things. In the process, both the art and the cause become more real and compelling.