Part 3.
Andy Grace is the third part of this series, and I'm extremely thankful for his participation. He and his wife live in the area affected by the tornado, but they're in good spirits.
Andy is a documentary filmmaker and professor of
Documenting Justice at UA. He is also a founder of the Druid City Garden Project (
http://www.druidcitygardenproject.org/), which connects schools with the locally grown food movement.
Doc Justice is a yearlong documentary filmmaking course for non-film majors at UA. I took the class my sophomore year, and Andy has been a friend and mentor ever since. He is the reason why I would love to make films & other creative projects for the rest of my life (at least as a hobby if nothing else).
I'm also indebted to him because he was the person who encouraged me to apply for the 2011 Student Freedom Ride. Without him, I wouldn't be on the trip of a lifetime.
My film can be found here:
a sleight of history
The film explores Foster Auditorium, memory in the American south, and UA's role in setting the public narrative of our state (among other things).
For links to the
Documenting Justice youtube channel, go here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/DocumentingJustice#p/a
Once again, many thanks to Andy.
1. What does civic engagement mean to you personally?
I guess if I were to try and describe my feelings on the matter I would have to say that for me, being civically engaged is trying to live in a way that focuses first on creating and sustaining an equitable community. I know that sounds painfully simple, but I’m essentially a pretty simple person with a deep streak of nostalgia and optimism. I want to live in a community that values conversation, shared ideals, democratic processes, and big community suppers. I want to live in the middle of Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” in a completely unironic way.
2. How have you seen the college generation use technology and social media for civic engagement? What most surprises you about their use? How have you used it personally?
I’ve seen college-aged folks use social media for civic engagement in a variety of ways and have used it myself for this, too. I’m convinced that it is the best way to disseminate information quickly and efficiently, and for that reason, it’s a vital tool to mobilize people. But the problem is that it’s much easier to engage in sitting in front of your computer than it is to actually get up and do something. I fear a lot of folks are armchair activists now – furiously posting, liking, and commenting on engagement opportunities for an amount of time and with an intensity that could have been far better applied to actually doing something. While I think social media is becoming an integral part of the modern human experience, I worry that it might be serving to disconnect us more that it’s actually connecting us. For instance, I notice that a lot of the college students I work with would much rather send an email and receive an email than actually have a face-to-face conversation. Perhaps in the future emailing/texting/Facebook posting, etc will become as meaningful an interaction as direct conversation, but for now, this trend worries me.
3. What is the relationship between civic engagement and Documenting Justice? What are the greatest benefits of the class in terms of your students and the Tuscaloosa community?
The truth is, as a class we start from a far more self-serving point than one that first addresses civic engagement. Let me explain: while it’s obvious that the work we do helps us engage with our community and helps provoke meaningful conversations here, I want my students to be driven first by the very selfish and ruthless goal of making good art – art that satisfies them emotionally and intellectually. I worry about the tendency of artists – especially young documentary filmmakers – to say that their goal is to “make change” or to advocate for certain positions. I think it’s much more important to be interested first in telling a good and true story. Ultimately, storytelling is the most humanizing thing we can do. Through that storytelling you can explore the issues and help provoke a conversation, but the first goal must be storytelling. William Faulkner was talking with a group of writers once about how they should separate the spheres of their life. He said, “You can be a reformer, but you don't need to be a poet at the same time. You'll be a poet for eight hours and be a reformer for eight hours and sleep for eight hours. There's no reason why they should ever conflict. If you try to be a reformer and a poet at the same time, then you're going to be writing propaganda, which stops being poetry.”
4. How have you seen the films impact both Tuscaloosa and the state as a whole? What most surprised you about the community response to a particular film?
Every year a handful of the films created in the class end up being shared and passed along to various agencies, politicians, nonprofits and others. The medium of film (especially film that focuses first on compelling storytelling) is such a powerful and immediate vehicle. For instance, I could tell you that there are only four doctors working in Wilcox County, Alabama – a rural and poor county of 15,000 residents – but if I show you a ten minute film about the doctors and their lives, and you see the patients, and you see the doctors making housecalls, and you see that two of the doctors are in their late sixties, you come away from the experience with a much more profound awareness of the dire health care situation in rural Alabama. Again, we’re not making these films to change the world – that would be a preposterous, disappointing, and grandiose position to take as a filmmaker – but the end result of the storytelling is often to help create powerful conversations about our priorities and our community values.
5. How did the Druid City Garden Project begin? What are the goals of the program? How does this project relate to civic engagement? What have been some of the greatest successes of this project?
The DCGP started out of a desire to see a more equitable and sustainable food system in Tuscaloosa. The four of us who started the project (my wife Rashmi and our friends Adam Weinstein and Emily Tipps) did so out of a sincere belief that food can help create community, and that good food – sustainably raised, locally sourced – can help promote economic development opportunities, a healthier lifestyle, an environmental ethic, and a strong sense of community stewardship. We envision community gardens and urban farms throughout Tuscaloosa. These sites would be places for citizens to work together and for school children to learn about science, math, and the environment. We started the organization only a year and a half ago, and our biggest accomplishment thus far has been the creation of a large organic garden at University Place Elementary School. But, like much else in Tuscaloosa, things have changed greatly after the April 27th tornado. The school and our garden were severely damaged by the storm. The garden is resilient and we can replant what was growing there. But the school’s damage – and the fact that kids won’t be coming there for at least six months if not more while the school is being repaired – puts that project in jeopardy. So, we’re working to establish more sites throughout the city and trying to find ways to use this catastrophe to help push forward our overarching agenda of a more equitable food system for Tuscaloosa.
6
. What is the relationship between creativity, education, and civic engagement for you personally?
Since it’s hard for me to connect all these threads without sounding overly pedantic, I’ll take this question as an opportunity to talk about why I do what I do. I make films because I love storytelling. I make documentaries because I love the challenge of finding compelling ways to tell true stories. When I make a film, I’m essentially trying to locate myself in the world. I always hope that the people who see my films can use them to think critically about what they value and what kind of world they want to live in. I teach because a handful of teachers in my life inspired me and motivated me and made me see the world from a different point of view. That was something that has mattered greatly to me as an artist and as a human being, and I’m teaching now because I hope that I might be able to similarly inspire students one day. I’m engaged in my community because I’m selfish. I want this world to work the way I think it should, and the only way to make that happen is to get out there, to start conversations, to meet people, to tell my story, to suggest ideas, to speak truth to power. Everything I do – from the art I make, to the classes I teach, to the organization I help run – is at the intersection of creativity, education, and civic engagement.
7. Name one initiative or type of civic engagement that you are personally involved in and would like to share with everyone. How are you involved in this project or initiative? What are the most important aspects to this type of civic engagement?
After the storm two weeks ago, everything has changed for our neighborhood, our city, our organization and my work. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what my new role is going to look like, but I’m in the middle of a variety of conversations about the rebirth of Tuscaloosa. We have an unprecedented opportunity for the city to embrace sustainable development as they rebuild the hardest hit areas. That would include green building, energy conservation and efficiency, community spaces like gardens and parks, and thinking critically about food systems as hard hit areas of the city are redesigned and rebuilt. I’m involved in an ad hoc (and thus far nameless) organization with a few other folks that is interested in giving the city some proposals for smart and sustainable growth and rebuilding. To that end, we’re having conversations with the organizations that helped promote green building in post-Katrina New Orleans. I’m also tremendously proud of a collaborative eBook called “Tuscaloosa Runs This” that was just released by some friends. The book features essays, poems and stories from Tuscaloosa writers, most of which were written immediately after the storm. It represents art as therapy, and it represents a group of citizens coming together to grieve, to cope, and to offer suggestions for a way forward. Getting back to an earlier theme of this conversation, it’s worth it to note that the eBook and its rapid dissemination would have been impossible without social media. I’d love for you to download a copy here: http://brianoliu.com/ebook/
8. Create any question you would like for this Q&A series. Then, please answer it! In addition to your answer, please provide the question that you create.
How can I get involved?
Put down your computer, talk to folks, ask questions, be interested in their answers, learn to listen, form opinions, think critically, share meals, meet people who are different from you, challenge the status quo, lift heavy objects with your legs, tell your friends you love them, get outside your comfort zone, tweet about it only after it’s over, be here now, find your passion and pursue it, don’t use margarine, ask people to tell you stories, tell your own story, write stuff down, get up early, go to bed late sometimes, don’t be passive, don’t be arbitrary, eat good food with friends, fight for what you believe, insist that the world be more equitable, don’t believe the hype, and laugh loudly every time something is funny – which should be often, or you’re taking yourself too seriously.
