Occupy Wall Street Filmmaking: How Is a Movie Like a Protest Movement? Willy Blackmore - TakePart
go to original August 13, 2013

Official Trailer - 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film

On October 1, 2011, Audrey Ewell was watching a livestream video of Occupy Wall Street protesters from her Brooklyn apartment. That day, a group marched from Zuccotti Park to the Brooklyn Bridge, where they were kettled by police officers and arrested en masse - a full 700 protesters were taken into police custody.

In the midst of the drama, which was playing out in the middle of a workday, the livestream feed went down. “So I turned on the TV and I figured this must be on the news - there were like 700 people being arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge in the middle of the day,” Ewell told me in a phone interview. “It seemed like news to me. So I turn on the TV and there was nothing - there was no coverage of it.”

That was the first day she and her filmmaking partner Aaron Aites lugged their cameras down to Zuccotti Park, shooting the initial footage for what would become 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film, a documentary about the protests that opens in New York and Los Angeles on September 6 and will air on pivot on September 17.

“We felt there was a need for accurate coverage, and if it wasn’t going to happen via the mainstream media, then we were sort of able to do it,” Ewell says about the impetus to start shooting footage that day. And as plans for a documentary began to coalesce, an experimental approach to filmmaking developed too, one colored by the particular organization of the protests - the working groups, the people’s mic, the general assembly.

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