We are about storytelling.
Educating people to take initiative to change.
We are half film company and half an activist company.
It's a hybrid if you will.
It's about investing in projects that can affect lives and help people.
The films will let us actually take an intimate look at someone's life and relate it to policy
and the politics and what we're trying to make changes around.
Our films are designed to engage and motivate people to take action.
Fight the prison profiteers.
Call your Senators and representatives.
You get to listen to these voices and you get to hear these stories of people that haven't
been heard from because no one is paying attention.
What we're here to do is say "How can we engage you, how can we reach you, and what will you
do as a result?"
When BNF started there were two rooms, and the three of us were divided between the two
rooms.
It was a small startup, the budget was very small.
It seemed a little bit insane that we could keep a company going that would make films
regularly.
It's been ten years now, and literally every day I still get up with this feeling of amazement
that I'm able to do this work.
And the incredible women and men who join in this battle that we take on every day.
And the issues are the issues that I really care about.
Justice and security.
I came from a lower income background, so a lot of the issues that we deal with directly
effect people who were just like me growing up, and I want our films to help them have
better lives.
When I found Brave New Films, the one thing that I thought was going to be my Achilles
heel actually turned out to be my strongest asset.
Dealing with cops and dealing with gun violence and drugs and all that other stuff -to be
able to go in and go back to some of these neighborhoods that look like the neighborhoods
I grew up in, and being able to share that with people to help affect change was the
best way to utilize any type of film capabilities I had.
I decided to make the transition from commercial film and television because I reached a certain
point in my life and several incidents came up together.
One was 9-11.
The time thinking -what was this country going to be like when we were focused almost exclusively
on revenge?
And the other factor was the death of my father.
One of the wonderful things he passed on to me was this notion that you do more than is
in your narrow self-interest.
The primary reason I wanted to work here was because of the projects that we do.
The possibility of affecting people's lives.
To me that is extremely important.
The danger to our country is grave, the danger to our country is growing.
We're not being told the truth about the reasons for the Iraq War.
I saw it as a deliberate attempt to selectively take information and try to basically say
Iraq poses an imminent nuclear threat, and therefore action is absolutely necessary.
And I felt that was absolutely wrong.
It was after the Uncovered screening when somebody said "Thank you for making the film".
I realized that what we were doing was important to these people because it reaffirmed what
they all felt.
We were interviewing ambassador Joe Wilson, and Joe was giving us all of this information
that no one, I believe, in the world knew at the time.
That was the moment that crystalized -this is a great place, this is a great project.
So that was the reason why I continued to work with Brave New Films.
There is no journalism at Fox News Channel.
It was just attack politics on a TV channel.
I came here because I saw Outfoxed.
It stunned me that people at a supposed "news" channel were allowed to do this.
We decided to pursue, investigate, expose -but using their clips.
Really, on the Republican side, what we do know is that for years they have coordinated
what they call their "message of the day".
So you're saying he flip flopped on the issue of this.
He does seem to agonize and flip flop, over and over and over again.
He's flip flopped on all these issues.
Beneath Kerry's flip-flopping- -He's an opportunistic flip-flopper.
Robert Greenwald, as you all know, is a propagandist who put out the dishonest Outfoxed documentary,
he is a radical progressive who blames America first.
When Bill O'Reilly and others started attacking me on the air, it hit me pretty quickly that
this was an incredible accomplishment.
The guy is just a ridiculous human being.
Yeah, like everybody knows Fox News is conservative.
You want to know why?
It was because of that movie.
It was amazing to see how far we had come from a period where Democratic politicians
were defending Fox -to a point where now the President and others were now saying very
openly -"No, you are a biased network."
They used a shadowy, right-wing organization as a front.
Hello, Fox News.
House parties have become a really wonderful, and fairly common organizing tool.
Brave New Films really pioneered the use of house parties.
House parties are really a bridge between watching a film and concrete ways to take
local, as well as National action around them.
Retail giant Walmart is encouraging its workers to go on welfare.
Instead of paying for its employees to have health benefits, she says Walmart is making
the Government take care of it.
Walmart stuck with me as a story that sprung from the people who were being affected by
it.
When it was shown to be actually a destructive force that was shutting down small businesses
and refusing to pay workers a fair wage.
I think that's what really changed people's minds about Walmart.
Before we filmed, we had a meeting in our courtyard here in Culver City.
Over a hundred groups that were all involved in working around Walmart.
There was labor unions, school organizations, worker rights groups, community organizations.
We said -committed -six months later, there was to be a finished film.
What we wanted to do was start everybody organizing with thousands of screenings that we knew
about and then lots of others that we didn't know about.
Walmart has set up a campaign-style war room to counter its critics.
The company has shot back, with video spots.
It seems the special interest propaganda machine behind the attacks against Walmart now includes
videomaker Robert Greenwald.
It began to have a real impact on Walmart trying to change some of their policies.
Can this administration take the military to war to feed the greed of contractors?
What we had done in the first film was talk about the reasons we were given for the war.
This film, we were going to talk about the profiteering -the money that was being made,
AND the lives that were being lost.
This was has been privatized to a greater extent than any other war in history.
Cases of fraud and incompetence by other contractors at the same time they were under investigation.
One of the reasons I got called before Congress was an investigating and making the film,
I had all kinds of information that Congress didn't have.
We were overwhelmed by the amount of people who responded -I mean, over the course of
the week, we had over 7,000 screenings.
We were able to raise money with T-Shirts, and producer credits, and posters and different
things.
People were saying, "Hey, I want to be a producer, y'know, here's $25."
The end crawl of the movie lists these thousands of people.
We certainly started doing this before Kickstarter -and now it's become certainly the norm.
What we're doing at Brave New Films on our "Rethink Afghanistan" campaign -we're asking
a series of core questions.
What is the strategy?
How many troops?
What is the costs?
And how do we know when it's time to leave?
Rethink Afghanistan was really put out there so that people would start thinking about
why we're doing this.
I was able, by raising funds from our supporters, to go to Afghanistan.
You don't need to be there more than a couple of minutes to realize this was a country with
profound problems -none of which were going to be solved by invading and occupying.
It was a very tough time for us, because we got a lot of blowback from supporters who
said, "You should not be making this movie", President Obama just recently came into office,
and he was pushing for a surge, and we need to give him a chance.
When Newsweek came out and validated our point of view, it was great for us.
I think we took on the Koch brothers because they were kind of the puppeteers behind the
scenes.
It was Robert's foresight to want to pull back the curtain to let the world know and
see woh these guys are.
I don't admire the Koch brothers.
I'm not against people who make money, that's fine.
But what they do with their money isn't fine with me.
They are interested in using the money they make to buy a political system.
The Koch Brothers not only want to destroy unions, but they want to destroy the lives
of working people across this country.
There was a story about fundamental greed.
And we had artist Shepard Fairey, who designed a T-Shirt for us.
To me, it became a phenomenon.
Let's take you LIVE to the Capital visitor's center, where this event featuring the release
of this movie, "Koch Brothers: Exposed" by filmmaker Robert Greenwald is due to get underway
momentarily.
I have been in contact with someone from Senator Reid's office, and they suggested maybe something
that happened where we'd do an event in DC in an effort to get more people aware of what
the film does.
Senator Reid and his office took the lead, Leader Pelosi joined, and suddenly we had
an event that was unimaginable.
Great to see a movie that is true.
The Koch Brothers, now putting forward a different image, because they're getting hurt.
It meant that we were having an impact.
I knew that if I remained silent, that I would be an accessory to a crime.
I ultimately chose, I made the fateful decision, to go to the press.
I love reading newspapers.
I had learned so much, so many stories that I never would have known about where people
were exposed -great investigative journalism.
And I got scared!
I really got scared that the reporters and the whistleblowers were going to be silenced.
These were strong personal stories of the Whistlelblowers -and if I could marry them
with the investigative journalists who put their stories forward, that could be an interesting
and impactful film.
We released it in April, things started bubbling up that week, with manning.
And then right after that, with Snowden.
And the timing was really -truly amazing.
The introduction is - this is what we do -we kill people and break things.
More than 1400 civilians Pakistanis have been killed in drone strikes.
Unmanned was unique for us.
We were looking through a different lens.
We were looking through the lens of what is actually happening to these citizens.
Each major television network, there in Pakistan, wanted to show the film.
So, what we did was we allowed ALL of the stations to show it at the same exact time,
or over the same period.
Their concerns about drones were legitimized outside of Pakistan.
And with this film, they had a tool to show the world what was going on.
(SPEAKING IN NATIVE LANGUAGE)
One of my favorite experiences with Brave New Films was working on the Unmanned congressional
briefing that we held, watching the first set of drone survivors speak to Congress.
That was history in the making.
We were on CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times.
We really were able to shine a light on what our drones were doing across the globe.
Our company is divided into two divisions -the features and the shorts side.
We talked with the political team and figure out what the aims of the video are, what the
audience is, and then we developed a concept based on that.
They're quick, they're fast, they can be produced quickly and distributed quickly.
For short films, groups are extremely important.
Because groups are the ones that are on the front lines everyday, they give us access
to the stories -to the research.
So when we work with groups, we're able to incorporate the work they're doing on the
ground and the information they have into the making of our films.
The Real McCain was one of our earliest shorts, was successful because politicians weren't
aware that everything on video now is accessible.
So politicians could say, "I never said that".
We put it together, and there it was -the contradiction.
The neighborhoods are safe, we walk down the streets with no body armor on.
McCain's delegation was guarded by more than 100 American soldiers and two Apache gunships
overhead.
Plus, we got to do more than just one thing -a documentary will take a year, if you're
lucky.
The United States now has a higher percentage of its people behind bars than any country
on Earth.
There's 3 toxic waste dumps, and all three of them are in low income minority communities.
One and a half trillion dollars for a plane that so far has not worked.
Is that all the money you got?
All of it.
Cuentame.
Cuentame means "Tell me your story, or count me in".
And that's exactly what we decided to do when we first started to really mobilize and create
a community of Latinos for Latinos -but the public in general.
Around specific campaigns and topics that impacted our community greatly.
Around six years ago, was when we started with Cuentame.
This was something that our staff was very passionate about.
They felt very strongly that we were not doing enough around the Latino community.
We had built this infrastructure based on a younger audience, based on Facebook.
Which was a new platform for us at the time.
What Beyond Bars does is visual storytelling.
Something dramatic that touches you in your heart and helps articulate why it's so important
to curb mass incarceration.
When I first learned about BNF, I looked at the prison profiteers series, and I really
liked it because they were quick, but packed full of information that I hadn't known about
before.
Guess what corporation makes an estimated $1.4 BILLION dollars a year off sick prisoners.
Mass incarceration wasn't being talked about.
How could it not be talked about, given the size and the scope of the problem, given the
class elements, given the racial elements.
The lives that were being destroyed by a system that was running amok.
There was an opportunity that hopefully we could do something about it.
It's time to think Beyond Bars.
We tried to make sure that the information that we have discovered is available for other
organizations.
We've tried to put together programs, and one of them is this media boot camp that we've
done over the past few years.
And that was set in place so we could teach organizations how to do the work that we do.
Right now I am in charge of the Educators program, which brings our stories to Universities
and High Schools.
And then the community screenings program.
We can ask the lawyer in your community, the pastor, the teacher -what can we do together
to make this better?
BNF has been literally five different companies in the last ten years.
That is an important part of the nature of BNF and Robert.
Constantly changing, constantly evolving.
When BNF was founded, YouTube and Facebook didn't exist.
And now, they're ubiquitous in the culture and they're absolutely vital to what we do.
So all that says to me is that ten years from now, the things that'll be most important
to us are the things that I don't even know about sitting here right now.
And that's something we have to be prepared for, and embrace.
And use that, and whatever new medium people step into, the cause of social justice is
a part of those stories that are being told.
I think stories are the way we make sense of our whole world.
I definitely wanted to be in a place where the point of the storytelling is to make a
big difference.
What's great is every day when I get up in the morning, I'm ready and raring to go because
we're doing great work that is making an impact in ways that I never would have thought even
imaginable in my life.
This is the route that I want to go for the rest of my life, using film as a medium to
create change.
People need to know about these things because the people in power are always going to try
to take advantage of the people who don't have power.
I would be very proud if one of the videos I made was the video that people said "I saw
this, and it motivated me to take a step back and go out in the street and protest".
And hopefully the films that we make today will inspire the next wave of activists and
filmmakers.
The system of inequity is being challenged in a way it wasn't questioned when we started.
So it makes the opportunities for what Brave New Films does even more significant.
Where some of the even most progressive voices -where they won't go, we should go.
And we should bring them with us.
No matter who is against us -mass media, big corporations, the government -we're going
to keep going, because we have to tell these stories.
Our job is telling the truth to make the world a better place.