The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Poulsen, moderated by Katie Arnold, a freelance journalist who has reported on Myanmar’s political and social development.

Speakers: 

Karen Stokkendal Poulsen is a writer and director with a background in foreign affairs and political science. Her 2014 documentary “The Agreement” was nominated for Best Nordic Documentary at the Göteborg Film Festival, Best Medium-Length Documentary at the Krakow Film Festival, and the F:ACT Award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival. She is currently working on developing a fictional television series based on the film. “On the Inside of a Military Dictatorship” premiered at the 2019 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in April 2019.

Katie Arnold is a freelance journalist previously based in Yangon, Myanmar where she covered the country’s political and social development. Her main area of specialism is the Rohingya crisis – having produced videos, articles and photography for Al Jazeera English, CNN and the BBC among others. She has also provided live TV commentary to BBC Radio 5, TRT World and France 24.

As the country sinks into an increasingly repressive regime under the helm of current President Abdulla Yameen – and strengthens ties with China and Saudi Arabia – we will be joined by exiled former president Mohamed Nasheed, journalist and author of The Maldives: Islamic Republic, Tropical Autocracy JJ Robinson, and others, to discuss the current situation in this small yet turbulent archipelago.

With at least 100 Maldivian jihadists now fighting in Syria and Iraq, a significant share of the country’s modest population, we will also discuss the increasing role of Islamism – as well as the implications for the wider South Asia region. We will explore hopes for the future and the role of an increasingly-repressed media in supporting an eventual transition to democracy – all as the impending threat of climate change on the low-lying islands continues to loom large.

This event will be chaired by BBC News South Asia editor Charles Haviland.

Mohamed Nasheed is a politician, environmental and human rights activist, and served as the fourth, and first democratically-elected, President of the Maldives from 2008 until 2012. In 2010, Newsweek included President Nasheed in its list of the ‘World’s Ten Best Leaders’, and he is frequently dubbed the ‘Mandela of the Maldives’. Nasheed is the recipient of numerous international awards, including the Anna Lindh Prize in recognition of his work promoting human rights, democracy and environmental protection, and the James Lawson Award for the practice of non-violent action.

JJ Robinson is a journalist and author of The Maldives: Islamic Republic, Tropical Autocracy. He spent four years working as an editor of the Maldives’ first independent English-language news outlet, and was among the only foreign witnesses to the 2012 coup d’état that toppled Nasheed‘s government. He was the Maldives’ Reuters correspondent and its Reporters Without Borders representative, and has appeared on the BBC, Radio Australia, Al Jazeera and other outlets as a Maldives expert.

Abbas Faiz is an independent South Asia specialist focusing on a number of countries including the Maldives. Until early 2016, he worked as a senior researcher with Amnesty International. He has travelled widely within the region and has authored scores of reports, press releases and policy documents during his 30-year working time with Amnesty, covering human rights concerns in almost all countries of South Asia including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Maldives. He has given in-depth interviews on human rights issues to a range of media, including Al Jazeera, ABC, CNN and the BBC, and has written for the Guardian, New Statesman and the Lancet amongst others. He has closely monitored the human rights situation in the Maldives over the past 20 years, and has provided strong support during this period to the country’s ongoing movement for democracy and human rights protection.

On Thursday 2 July, Hyeonseo Lee joined an audience at the Frontline Club for a discussion on her experiences as a North Korean defector. Lee, an international campaigner for North Korean human rights and refugee issues, was joined in conversation by author Paul French.

One day after dinner, seventeen-year-old Lee told her parents that she was going to visit a neighbour. “Make sure you’re home before dark,” her mother said at the door. She promised not to be back late and turned to leave her house forever.

The young Lee headed for the neon lights of China that had long beckoned her from across the border. Here she discovered the inevitable loneliness of life as a fugitive, constantly terrified of being uncovered and drifting from her sense of self with every false name she adopted.

“I had to change my name constantly to protect my identity, so I became the girl with seven names,” she said at the start of the talk.

French, an analyst and commentator on Asia, invited Lee to elaborate on points she had mentioned in her memoir The Girl with Seven Names.

He asked about the recurrent theme of superstition, which punctuates much of the book: “Your mother takes you several times to see a fortune teller to try and work out everything from whether or not this boy will be a good marriage or bad marriage, to if you’re going to leave the country what day should you go on.”

French said he was interested in understanding the role of superstition in an atheistic, communist regime.

Lee responded: “People have nothing to rely on so they really, severely rely on the fortune teller,” she laughed. “I even went to see a fortune teller a few months ago.”

As a young girl, a fortune teller predicted that Lee would escape from North Korea, stating, “you will eat the foreign country rice.” Yet even then she only imagined that she would live in a different area of the country – never abroad. She said that the reason North Korea is a “collapsed country” is because Kim Jong-Il believed his own fortune teller too much.

The conversation moved onto the perceived supremacy of the Kim dynasty. Lee admitted that she always believed the leaders to be Gods: “We didn’t consider them as normal human beings” she said. “Until I was fourteen, I thought Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il don’t go to the bathroom and that they killed the enemies when they were five or six years old.”

She expressed amazement at her previous naivety, but defended her beliefs and those still held by her compatriots: “From the moment you are born you are brainwashed severely, even though it’s all a lie, if you hear it every day, every minute, it becomes the truth.”

When Kim Jong-il died, everyone knew that they had to cry or risk dangerous consequences, and “many people really cried with their hearts.” Yet some citizens were sent to prison camps for crying too little, and others for crying too much and appearing insincere.

As well as growing up to a drumbeat of propaganda asserting the Kim family’s godly status, Lee also learned from an early age not to trust anyone. Her mother used to tell her that ‘the walls have ears and the fields have eyes,’ and politics was very rarely spoken about at home.

“Even husband and wife can’t trust each other,” she said.

Her mother was spied on for six years by someone she considered to be her best friend. One day, sick with guilt, the woman spy admitted that she had been reporting to the government on all her actions. Lee said that this kind of betrayal was “everyone’s experience in North Korea.”

Spying and duplicity extended beyond the borders of her country and into China, where new ‘friends’ reported her to the police as a North Korean defector. Lee was forced to lie to her roommate in Shanghai, who years later texted her saying, “I didn’t know you were a defector – I just saw your Ted Talk!”

Lee now lives in Seoul with her mother and brother, whom she helped escape North Korea thirteen years after her own flight. She is married to an American man called Brian.

“My mum was the most brainwashed woman. When I introduced my boyfriend to her she really treated him as an ‘American bastard’. In North Korea, we didn’t learn that Americans were human beings, we just had one word: American-bastards.”

Growing up in North Korea, she was taught that all men from the US had long noses and dressed in military clothes, while the British were always portrayed as gentlemen in tall black hats and capes. Relieved, she said that her mother now accepts the “American-bastard” as a son.

Click here for more information on The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story.

International coverage of the Democratic Republic of Congo often focuses either on scenes of horror playing out in the eastern parts of the country, or the urban chaos of its capital, Kinshasa. “For me, it was also this whole middle ground of the daily life: a post office worker, a fireman, somebody working at a railway station,” said director Kristof Bilsen in the Q&A that followed the preview screening of Elephant’s Dream at the Frontline Club on Monday 9 February.

Elephant’s Dream director Kristof Bilsen

In the film, Bilsen poetically portrays the “limbo” in which workers of three State-owned companies slowly languish day after day.

When asked by an audience member what the greatest challenges were that he encountered during filming, the director confessed that it was a frustrating process to accurately depict the “vicious circles” in which many citizens of the Democratic Republic of Congo are stuck.

“Some people really get angry because they think that I should show things that are moving forward, that are positive. And I think for me it is very positive (…) the fact that they dare to say how absurd the situation is.”

Bilsen also commented on his desire to break away from traditional structures, and criticised the tendency of numerous other films on similar subjects to treat characters “in a kind of a victimised way.” He added: “They get maybe a quote or two from journalists who present the mic and ask how difficult and painful their situation is, but this shouldn’t take too long and if they are lucky they get their names as a title.”

Bilsen began shooting Elephant’s Dream in 2010, as part of a short film project ahead of his graduation from film school. The director continued to return to Kinshasa over the three years which followed, in order to document the development, or lack thereof, in the lives of the film’s protagonists. This long-running process brought positive consequences not only to the director.

“She [Henriette, one of the film’s key protagonists] has been very, very happy that she went through the film-making process with me, because it really made her question the situation and be more assertive to the bosses,” he explained.

The audience brought up the question of China and its growing influence in the DRC and the rest of Africa, which Bilsen addresses only briefly in the film: “I did it consciously. I did not want to shed too much light on it because it sort of distracts the attention from the characters that we engage with.”

Although he kept the political context of the region in mind during filming, Bilsen was keen that Elephant’s Dream be a personal and poetic piece. He considered a brief shot in which President Joseph Kabila’s face appears on stamps to be the “most political statement of the film,” and even considered removing this from the final edit.

Bilsen remained enthusiastic about returning to Kinshasa in the future, to find other stories and to document the progress of the protagonists of Elephant’s Dream. First, however, he is keen to screen the film in Kinshasa itself: “I dream of the idea of going with a generator and a mini-van to the post office and showing the film there.”

For more information on upcoming screenings, visit the Elephant’s Dream website.

As he walks to sit at the front of the room one can see Gene Sharp is frail, and at times it’s hard to hear his gravelly voice. But you can’t doubt the passion with which he speaks, or the power in his words.

His ideas on non-violent revolution have been hugely influential in the ‘Arab Spring’ and further afield to Burma and the Ukraine. Sharp founded the Albert Einstein Institution in 1983 to promote ideas of non-violent revolution. These ideas, Sharp says in conversation with journalist/filmmaker Ruaridh Arrow, are “terrifyingly simple”: if you are less obedient then you restrict the sources of authoritarian power.

“When people lose their fear and use their brains and plan skilfully, and act bravely, and maintain non-violent discipline… you have a good chance of succeeding.”

Sharp’s conclusions on how best to organise non-violent action is the result of a long period over which his ideas matured. One of his first significant stands came in reaction to the Vietnam war.

“I had chosen a particular kind of conscientious objection – the most obnoxious kind: civil disobedience… I refused to fill out more applications for conscientious objector status, I refused to carry a draft card, I refused to report for physical examination.”

He researched non-violent action in Oxford, later moving to Oslo University.

“What I discovered is that I didn’t know a damn thing about political power. I learnt that I didn’t know, and that’s a great advantage… because you have a chance of learning if you want to and you’re not arrogant.”

He returned with a 11,000-page manuscript. Notes on different types of non-violent action littered his room until the ‘moment’ came.

“I discovered the mechanism of non-violent coercion – which I once thought was heretical I concluded was absolutely valid… I discovered that the way coercion could be established was identical with the beginning analysis that I’d almost forgot of the sources of power and that this type of [inaudible] takes away the sources of power of even dictatorships… That was the Eureka moment.”

A list of 12 methods to use non-violent action lengthened and he published ‘198 Methods of Non-violent Action’ in 1973.

Perhaps his best-known book,‘From Dictatorship to Democracy’, published 1993 is available in 30 languages.

Sharp says the success of his books is unexpected but can be put down to the fact that;

“People have been quietly desperate, even hungry that something can be done so we don’t suffer these horrible fights that people all these decades have been suffering.”

In the question and answer section, two questions come about how to act to best effect change in Iran. Sharp’s answer is typical in its modesty.

“An outsider like me can’t tell you what to do and if I did you shouldn’t believe me. Trust yourselves, research, investigate it and think – and think and think and think.”