"We Are Many" is a documentary film about the never-before-told story of the biggest protest in history
p>LONDON (AlertNet) – Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring may be getting all the online attention right now, but an upcoming documentary aims to show how the mass protests of the modern day took root long before social media.“We Are Many” uses film and online crowd-sourcing to document the 2003 protest against the war in Iraq, the biggest anti-war rally in history when millions took to the streets across 800 cities in seven continents using grassroots mass mobilisation.
“We are trying to tell an absolutely landmark story in the history of peace and humanitarian causes and one of the reasons I wanted to form this online platform was to create this sort of digital monument or permanent archive of that day,” filmmaker Amir Amirani told AlertNet in London.
Created with the input of big names including Hollywood director Danny Glover, the film which is due for release in 2013 – marking the tenth anniversary of the march – tells the global stories of a single historic day through interviews with organisers, artists, musicians and everyday people.
“This was a new kind of international social movement and it takes a lot of leg work to dig into the story and try to find out the mechanisms, find out the people behind it and try to connect all the pieces and see what effect it had on society,” Amirani said.
Its partner website wearemany.tv, which is calling for donations to help make the film, aims to reunite people who took part on the February 15. 2003 protest by encouraging them to upload and share stories that could end up in the documentary.
“The film and the website will be symbiotic, the film will be the sort of clarion call, pulling visual centre piece around which hopefully the website will grow and attract people to tell their stories and build a community,” Amirani said.
The documentary will be filmed in countries where the biggest protests took place that day – in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, Australia and Egypt.
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