A stark blue sky and a row of sand dunes. A camel lowers itself to the ground and a traveler dismounts. Over the soundtrack, we hear the melody of the West African blues. The setting is the Sahara Desert in Mali, 40 miles from Timbuktu. Here, the film opens with the rhythms and performances of the Festival au Desert -- the Desert Music Festival. The festival draws on the native Tuareg tradition of meeting seasonally to peacefully settle disputes, exchange the bounty of travel, and celebrate life with non-stop music, dancing, and games. Visitors from many nations arrive, and in a voiceover, Korean poet Ko Un tells us, “Resistance is not a politics but a culture. Resistance shouldn’t be against something, but it should create something on its own.”

caipirinha productions presents CULTURES OF RESISTANCE

The Festival Au Desert is a vital oasis for those who seek creative solutions to violent conflicts. Fortunately, it is not unique. Other pockets of art, protest, and creation can be found throughout the world. Documenting these—and drawing associative, poetic links between them—will be the mission of the film.

Departing the desert, the film pans out to survey the worldwide actions organized on the International Day of Peace. Since 2001, a growing number of organizations have observed this day, which declares September 21 of each year a day of global ceasefire and sets aside time to celebrate the possibility of international peace. We see joyful demonstrators, dressed in white shirts, singing as they take to the streets in Sierra Leone; a multiracial peace brigade engaging with bystanders as they march in France; women reading a declaration of nonviolence in Afghanistan; balletic dancers performing in the city center of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The montage of creative resistance from every continent ends in Sri Lanka. This is a divided island that has been ravaged by civil war for decades. We meet activists such as Kumar Rupesinghe of the Foundation for Coexistence. Their simple goal, coexistence, seems very difficult to attain. Yet Rupesinghe counsels that popular interventions can succeed in reducing violence and repression. “Governments can only rule and oppress people if the people accept it,” he says. “If the majority of the people say ‘no,’ no government can remain in power.”

On the other side of the Indian Ocean, Buddhist monks in Burma are putting this precept to the test. Here, a military junta has refused to recognize the democratically elected leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi and calls for national dialogue, brutally repressing voices of dissent and resistance. But here, too, there are signs of hope and courage. Dressed in brilliant saffron robes, the monks in this heavily Buddhist nation have braved the possibility of arrest, torture, and even execution in order to give voice to a more humane ethics. 

If the monks’ brightly colored robes mark them as one tribe in resistance, the brilliant body paints worn by the indigenous people of Brazil’s Xingu serve as the markings of another. Glenn Switkes, program director of International Rivers, tells us “The Xingu is one of the largest rivers in the world. The plan is to dam all the major tributaries of the Amazon River. There will be immense pressure, not only on ecological reserves, but also on the communities and the territories that are used sustainably by indigenous people.” Accordingly, native peoples are resisting the destruction of their cultures and communities. While largely peaceful, indigenous activists also resort to symbolic violence, threatening a project manager of the dam with machetes and cutting his arm as a warning. The film uses the incident to explore the difficulty of maintaining creative and nonviolent stances in the face of enormous structural violence that endangers entire ways of life.