Volume Ten, Number One   January 2005   www.columbiajournal.ca

Hard to Resist Cheering

by Dan Keeton

The Fourth World War. A big noise film. Available on DVD through www.bignoisefilms.com

More a kaleidoscope of images with a poetical and minimal narrative than a more conventional documentary, this production is one get your heart pumping and adrenaline flowing. If you're the least bit concerned about how globalization is threatening people's lives and destroying the planet, this is the film to get you off the couch and out marching in demonstrations.

The Fourth World War is not a documentary in the style of  Michael Moore's offerings or Canada's The Corporation, worthy as those efforts are. With a non intrusive commentary from singer-songwriter Michael Franti of the agitationist group Spearhead and Suheir Hammad, a Tony Award-winning Palestinian poet, the project uses powerful imagery  coupled with brief interviews to present struggles from across the globe. Included are jobless Argentine workers seizing their factories and stopping freeway traffic, thousands of trade unionists braving police armies in the streets of Seoul, South Korea, peasant farmers in Chiapas, Mexico, the battered but defiant residents of Gaza and the West Bank, and the millions of marginalized black citizens of South Africa who now have the vote but still no social or economic justice.

You don't just see these people suffering. You see them in action. Palestinian children as young as five and six years use their hands or slings to lob rocks at marauding Israeli tanks flattening their neighbourhoods. When a tear gas grenade is launched into their midst, protesters volley them back into police lines. It's hard to resist cheering – and why not cheer? -- as the fence protecting delegates to the Free Trade of the America's parley in Quebec City is torn down.

The Fourth World War is a professionally assembled montage from Richard Rowley and Jacqueline Soohen, New York based filmmakers whose previous efforts include the acclaimed, This Is What Democracy Looks Like. Their new effort has also received accolades from several sources, include Canada's Naomi Klein, co-director of another new documentary, The Take.

The Fourth World War may not get major screen time. Copies, however, can be ordered through the web site listed above. Get it. Show it to as many people as you can. It just might help turn reverse the direction of land seizures and privatization by corporate globalizers through a new 21st century liberation movement.