KARACHI: Two American film-makers — Alix Madigan and Maria Raquel Bozzi — underlined in front of a select audience how to use film as a tool to amplify social justice at an event held by the Centre for Excellence in Journalism (CEJ) at IBA on Thursday morning.

Rafay Mahmood moderated the event. His first question to the panellists was about the approach to cinema in an environment where social issues change rapidly. Ms Madigan said in the film Winter’s Bone, which she produced, the two issues that dovetailed [into each other] were poverty in rural America and the crystal meth epidemic

which was strong at the time the movie was made. When the film was released they could tap into journalists who would write editorial content on those subject matters.

She said one of the projects she’s working on is a story about [boxer] Muhammad Ali’s conversion to Islam. When she read the book the film is based on she thought that this was the subject she would like to explore.

Ms Bozzi said if she was to make films made on topics such as those mentioned by Ms Madigan she’d want to make them based on grounded experiences.

Ms Madigan said we need to remember that the medium of film is essentially about telling stories in an entertaining way. While tackling a message, there are movies that do it in a ‘take-your-medicine’ way which becomes difficult to sit through. You [film-makers] can exploit issues and at the same time [they should] make them entertaining with a strong narrative.

Ms Bozzi said you need to start with something you care deeply about, with a personal connection to it, and how you communicate that is what’s important. There’s a thin line between entertaining and tackling the issues you care about. A very good example is Jordon Peel’s film Get Out. Race in America is a hot topic and is not going away.

It’s pervasive and still happening. Here’s someone [Peele] who wants you to realise that. His film was entertaining, and it was a genre movie. We [audience] were on edge.

Ms Madigan said the word commercial has many different shades to it. There have been films which were not commercial at the outset but had box office success because they had some kind of universal, accessible emotions in them. Their stories were able to touch people.

Since the invite to the programme had requested the guests to see the movie Spotlight [the story about the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church which journalists at the Boston Globe worked on and exposed] before coming to the event on Thursday, the moderator quite late in the discussion raised the question about the panellists’ reaction to Spotlight when it first came out. Ms Madigan said it’s a wonderfully old-fashioned way to tell that story. It’s classic film-making in terms of mystery and the spark of the story that spawned into a journalistic movement. The Catholic Church and the sexual abuse scandal had been around for quite some time, but there was no inroad into the story because it was so brutal; therefore, to show it through journalists who could be heroes in exposing it was the best way to tell that story — and bring people to justice.

Ms Bozzi said those who made the movie specialised in making projects with a strong social message. The film is a great example of magnifying a message.

After the chitchat, short videos were shown about independent film-making and Global Media Makers, a cultural exchange programme.

Published in Dawn, July 26th, 2019