The film introduces us to two defectors  – 26 year old Eunhee Park and 25-year old Suuyeoung Lee, who is about to make her first appearance on the show. Both escaped with the help of smugglers who charged about 7,000 US dollars to take the women on a terrifying journey across the border into China and eventually to Thailand, from where they could reach South Korea.  The Chinese authorities arrest defectors and send them back, where they can face execution.

These women’s intimate stories paint a picture of a country where communism is being supplemented by a North Korean version of capitalism, with entrepreneurs making money by selling goods from China on the black market.  As many men work for the government, black market enterprises are run by women – which perhaps explains why over 70 per cent of those with the money and contacts needed to escape from the North are women.

Reporter: Seyi Rhodes

Producer/Director: Kate Hardie-Buckley

Series Editors: Monica Garnsey & Hugo Ward

A Quicksilver Media production

Speakers:

Chaired by series producer Hugo Ward

Kate Hardie-Buckley is a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker.

Paul French is an author and widely published analyst and commentator on Asia, Asian politics and current affairs. He is author of North Korea: State of Paranoia and the international and bestseller Midnight in Peking.

John Everard is former British Ambassador to North Korea and author of Only Beautiful, Please: A British Diplomat in North Korea

Among the many instances of imaginative defiance explored, Crawshaw discovers the surprising impact of Lego figures in Siberia, red-hatted dwarves in Poland and a donkey holding a press conference in Azerbaijan – not to mention the story of how Darth Vader helped to effect a global arms treaty.

But how effective are humour and creativity in bringing about social change?

Discussion chaired by Channel 4 News Correspondent Fatima Manji.

Steve Crawshaw is a senior advocacy adviser at Amnesty International.  He was previously London director and UN advocacy director of Human Rights Watch. He joined The Independent at launch and reported on the east European revolutions,  the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Balkan wars. Interviewees ranged from Slobodan Milosevic to Aung San Suu Kyi. His previous books include Small Acts of Resistance (co-authored with John Jackson, 2010, foreword by Vaclav Havel), Easier Fatherland: Germany and the Twenty-First Century (2004) and Goodbye to the USSR (1992).

Fatima Manji is a News Correspondent and regularly reports on a range of national and international stories. Her broadcasting has included telling the story of the migration crisis from the borders of Europe, interviewing victims of ISIS atrocities in Iraq and challenging politicians here in the UK during the referendum campaign. She also occasionally presents the programme from the studio. Fatima has won a number of awards for her journalism and in 2015 she was a finalist for the Royal Television Society’s Young Journalist of the Year. During the last General Election she presented Britain’s first ever Alternative Election Debate featuring young party leaders facing a live audience on Channel 4. Fatima joined Channel 4 News in 2012 and previously worked as a reporter and video journalist at the BBC.

How to Change the World chronicles the adventures of an eclectic group of young pioneers – Canadian hippie journalists, photographers, musicians, scientists, and American draft dodgers – who set out to stop Richard Nixon’s atomic bomb tests in Amchitka, Alaska, and end up creating the worldwide green movement.

Greenpeace was founded on tight knit, passionate friendships forged in Vancouver in the early 1970s. Together they pioneered a template for environmental activism which mixed daring iconic feats and engagement with worldwide media: placing small rubber inflatables between harpooners and whales; blocking ice-breaking sealing ships with their bodies; spraying the pelts of baby seals with dye to make them valueless in the fur market.

The group had a prescient understanding of the power of media, knowing that the advent of global mass communications meant that the image had become a more effective tool for change than the strike or the demonstration. But by the summer of 1977, Greenpeace Vancouver was suing Greenpeace San Francisco and the organisation had become a victim of its own anarchic roots, saddled with large debts and frequent in-fighting.

How To Change The World draws on interviews with the key players and hitherto unseen archive footage, which brings these extraordinary characters and their intense, sometimes eccentric and often dangerous world alive.

Directed by: Jerry Rothwell
Produced by: Al Morrow & Bous de Jong
Year: 2015
Running time: 110′

Antony Butts and Orysia Lutsevych

As part of the Documenting Ukraine festival held on Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 May in partnership with Open City Docs and GRAD, the Frontline Club screened the UK premiere of Anthony Butts’ work in progress: The Curious Tale of a Handmade Country.

With astonishing access, Butts followed and filmed Ukrainian rebels in the east of the country as they attempted to establish the Donetsk People’s Republic.

After the screening, Butts was joined by journalists Nataliya Gumenyuk and Oliver Carroll and Chatham House fellow Orysia Lutsevych for an in-depth discussion. The conversation touched upon economic grievances, propaganda and the escalation of the conflict.The first question from an audience member was on how Butts succeeded in gaining such impressive and unfettered access to a world that was reluctant to welcome journalists, and feared misrepresentation by the media.

“First off, I said that I was making a big documentary about the creation of the country, so that kind of appealed to people’s egos,” said Butts, adding that being a documentary filmmaker awarded him a more privileged identity than that of a reporter.

He built trust with the key figures in his documentary by finding common ground.

“I was actually sort of saying, ‘I’m kind of with you on this class war thing’,” Butts said. “‘I’m fed up of oligarchs as well taking over London’… so I was able to speak about what we had in common.”

The film provided a snapshot of a unique period of time. Carroll, who was talking to the Frontline Club audience via Skype from Donetsk, remembered the conflicting atmospheres.

“[Watching the film] brought a lot of memories back from that very strange time in the city,” he said. “Despite, as you saw in the film, the immense violence and tension that was happening there, there was also a sort of weird carnival element to it all.”

The rebels had a high level of support in the region, Carroll explained.

“A lot of people genuinely support the idea of this Luhansk, Donetsk People’s Republic, and in a sort of anti-Kiev, self-identity, self-fulfilment type of way. And I think that’s increasing,” he said.

Those who did not feel pulled by the prospects of self-determination, Carroll said, were pushed “for right or wrong” by the belief that Ukraine was shelling their cities.

“The understanding is that it’s the Ukrainians firing, and in understanding that they’re firing on us, well you know, we can’t be part of this Ukrainian system anymore.”

2nd Day of films @frontlineclub started with an impressive one about ‘DNR’. @Orysiaua @ngumenyuk at postshow talk now pic.twitter.com/j3psGRQc0N

— Ukrainian London (@UkrainianLondon) May 17, 2015

The Euromaidan protests held similar goals to those initial aims of the Donetsk People’s Republic. “The same economic problems were in Odesssa, in Western Ukraine, in many other regions which hadn’t been heard by the government in 25 years,” said Gumenyuk.

However, the region was already relatively politically disenfranchised in Kiev before the events in Euromaidan and, as Carroll explained, Russia seized the opportunity to exploit this existing divide.

“Kiev played its hand very badly,” he said. “It needed to be a lot more unpredictable than it was. But at the same time it was falling into traps, but the traps were being placed there for it.”

“I have actually great sympathy to the people portrayed in this movie,” said Gumenyuk. “They were speaking against the oligarchs, while we definitely knew that, for instance, these same rallies were funded by the same oligarchs.”

The film also commented on the influence of Russian state television on the protests, yet Lutsevych told the audience of other ways that propaganda made its way across the border.

On one visit to Ukraine, her translator told Lutsevych that Russian DJs touring Eastern Ukraine were warning their audiences of threats of fascism from Kiev. “They’re coming with their popular concerts and trying to say these kinds of things to people,” she said.

Lutsevych spoke out about the “dangerous” way in which Russia was “manipulating millions of people” into the current conflict, citing evidence that the Kremlin had plans to stoke a rebellion even before Euromaidan started.

“Yes, Russia is being a baddie,” said Butts. “[But] from their point of view they’ve good geopolitical reasons to do so… it’s like the Monroe Doctrine for the Americans, it’s just the way [they believe] the world works. The question is how do we combat it?”

“There was a moment when the [rebel’s revolution] would have burnt itself out… I think that that war could have been prevented because Russia, as I said, is using every trick in its book. But it takes two to tango. The people [in Donetsk] were reacting to something.”

“If Ukrainian TV hadn’t demonised [the rebels],” said Butts, “… if they had laid off them a bit and sort of said, ‘we hear you guys, ok? You’re protesting in your strange way, we’re with you’… There would have been less anger on the ground.”

However, other members of the panel put the cause of conflict squarely down to Russian intervention in the country.

“In the movie, ethnic issues didn’t come up a single time,” said Lutsevych, “which was quite interesting. They didn’t say, ‘they will come here and make us speak Ukrainian and they will kill all our Soviet heroes’… it was more ideological.”

Importantly for Lutsevych, there was no existing internal conflict or civil war within Ukraine before Russia began to intervene. “I think this is even more scary when you think how easily you can create these artificial divisions,” she said.

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By Josie Le Blond 

On Saturday 16 May, the Frontline Club held a special screening of shorts and clips reflecting on the Euromaidan movement in Ukraine as part of the two-day Documenting Ukraine festival.

The short films – extracts from the longer work Euromaidan. Rough Cut – trace the efforts of a group of Ukrainian filmmakers who documenting several months of civil unrest, beginning in Autumn 2013 and culminating in the resignation of President Yanukovych in February 2014.

The resulting clips form a mosaic of images and moments which, put together, allow a powerful insight into life on the Maidan barricades.

The screening began with the short film Lenin’s Teeth, in which activists tear down a statue of Lenin during Maidan protests in Kiev in December 2013.

Then followed filmmaker Roman Bondarchuk‘s short Search for a Leader, showing discussions between activists as they attempt to self-organise which trapped in a police cordon on a bitterly cold winter’s night.

All Things Ablaze followed, which documents the violent struggles between police and activists in the weeks preceding Yanukovych’s resignation, in which flames, gunshots, molotov cocktails and bloodshed are regular features.

The following discussion with filmmakers and academics touched upon the challenges faced by the filmmakers, as well as their motivations in documenting the Maidan protests.

Filmmaker Roman Bondarchuk presented his reasoning: “For me, the biggest challenge was to film or to throw stones. I realised that filming was more useful.”

Everyday Rebellion is a cross-media documentary about creative forms of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience worldwide.

What does the Occupy movement in New York have in common with the Spanish Indignados protests or the Arab Spring? Is there a connection between the struggle of the Iranian democracy movement and the nonviolent uprising in Syria, and what is the link between the Ukrainian topless activists of Femen and an Islamic society like Egypt? And to top it off, what do Serbia and Turkey have to do with all of this?

The reasons for the various people’s uprisings in these countries may be diverse, but the creative nonviolent tactics they use in their struggles are strongly connected. So are the dedicated activists who share these strategies, new ideas and established methods. Everyday Rebellion is a story about the richness of peaceful protest, acted out everyday by passionate people from Spain, Iran, Syria, Ukraine, the USA, the UK and Serbia.

These methods are inventive, funny and unrelenting. And the activists who use them believe that creative nonviolent protest will triumph over violence in the effort to challenge dictatorships and the crushing power of global corporations. Everyday Rebellion is a tribute to the creativity of nonviolent resistance, and to a modern and rapidly-changing society in which new and inventive forms of protest are conceived every day.

Directed by Arman T. Riahi & Arash T. Riahi
Duration: 118′
Year: 2014
www.everydayrebellion.net

Described as India’s “tinsel slum”, the Kathputli artist colony in New Delhi is home to over 1,500 families of puppeteers, acrobats, painters and magicians. That is all about to change. When the government sells the land to private developers, traditional life is set to be razed for the city’s first skyscraper.

Where outsiders see the slum’s rancid water and shacks, debut filmmakers Adam Weber and Jimmy Goldblum find stunning colours in death-defying performances. Whether bathed in sunlight or exploding against night skies, magnificent fire-eaters, sleight of hand magicians and glorious puppets radiate beauty in crisp, brilliant detail.

As in-fighting breaks out among colony leaders, spilling out into confrontations with developers and the government, the clock ticks onwards to the bulldozing date. Will the artists’ resolve to preserve their culture and overcome the push for progress?

Gorgeous and inspiring, Tomorrow We Disappear is a splendid tribute to fading artistry and the tenacity of tradition.

Directed by Adam Weber and Jimmy Goldblum
Duration: 85′
Year: 2014

It is a year since protests erupted in Ukraine. The events that followed saw the fall of Viktor Yanukovych, the annexation of Crimea and violent clashes breaking out across the east of the country.

As the stand off with Russia continues, we will be taking a view of the situation in Ukraine one year on. Will 2015 see an end to the most dangerous conflict to grip Europe since the wars in the former Yugoslavia?

With fighting ongoing, our panel will be exploring the divisions that have developed in the country and what the future holds for the unity of Ukraine.

Chaired by Gabriel Gatehouse, BBC foreign correspondent who has covered the crisis in Ukraine extensively.

The panel:

Andrey Kurkov, is an acclaimed Ukrainian writer and commentator. He is the author of many novels, including the bestselling Death and the Penguin. Last year he published Ukraine Diaries, a first-hand account of the ongoing crisis in his country.

Orysia Lutsevych is a research fellow at Chatham House Russia and Eurasia Programme looking at the role civil society in post-Soviet transitions. Her current research project focuses on Russian use of non-state actors in foreign policy and ‘soft power’.

Tonia Samsonova is a London correspondent for Echo of Moscow radiostation, one of few relatively independent media outlets in Russia. In summer 2014 she launched the media-project TheQuestion.ru.

Robert Brinkley was the British Ambassador to Ukraine from 2002-06 and is the chairman of BEARR Trust.

Photograph: Getty Images

Screening: The Term + Q&A

Friday 17 October 2014, 7:00 PM

The Term tells the unique inside story of the Russian opposition movement as Vladimir Putin settles into the Kremlin for his third term, through exclusive access to anti-corruption blogger Aleksei Navalny and other key opposition figures, including Putin’s god-daughter, Ksenia Sobchak, and Solidarnost leader, Ilya Yashin. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with with producer Max Tuula via Skype.
 

Insight with Michael Žantovský: Havel and the Velvet Revolution

Monday 3 November 2014, 7:00 PM

Twenty-five years ago in December 1989, Václav Havel was elected as President of Czechoslovakia, marking the end of the Velvet Revolution and with it, the culmination of 41 years of communist rule. By his side throughout was Michael Žantovský, Havel’s press secretary, speech-writer, translator and close friend. Žantovský will be joining us in conversation with Edward Lucas, senior editor at The Economist, to bear witness to Havel’s extraordinary life as documented in his new book Havel: A Life, and to share his own experiences of living through the Velvet Revolution and the formation of the Czech Republic.

First Wednesday Screening: 1989

Wednesday 5 November 2014, 7:00 PM

On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are pleased to be part of a pan-European simultaneous screening of the new documentary 1989 by award-winning director Anders Østergaard. The film 1989 is a high-politics drama about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Østergaard recreates the events of 1989 and invites the audience into secret meeting rooms through a mixture of testimonials, archive material, and reconstructed dialogues of the key political players.

Screening: Four Velvet Men Then and Now – Jan Ruml + discussion

Friday 14 November 2014, 7:00 PM

For 20 years, director Pavel Koutecký and later director Jan Šikl followed the lives of four remarkable men who played key roles in the ending of communism in Czechoslovakia in November 1989. What followed was a period of change and transition, offering opportunities to those who were ready to seize them. This screening will be followed by a discussion on the challenges societies are faced with after a regime change.

These events are part of the Made in Prague Festival, 17 October – 30 November 2014.

It is just over a year since protests to save Istanbul’s Gezi Park escalated after being met by an uncompromising stance from the government and a police crackdown. What started as an environmental movement became a wider protest against the perceived increased authoritarianism of the country’s leader.

As the protests continue and with the country due to vote in the first round of the presidential elections in early August, we will be bringing together a panel to gauge the political climate. With accusations of cronyism and mass corruption inside the government, we will explore what the protestors are fighting for and how much support they have across the country.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan faced large-scale criticism following his reaction to the industrial disaster that killed over 300 miners. We will be asking how much support he still maintains in the country and if he is to contest and win the election what does this mean for Turkey?

Chaired by Murat Nisancioglu, the head of Turkish Service at BBC Global News.

The panel:

Alexander Christie-Miller is a freelance journalist and Turkey correspondent for Newsweek, The Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has lived and worked in Istanbul for the past four years.

Fadi Hakura is an associate fellow at the Europe programme, Chatham House.

Sir David Reddaway was British Ambassador to Turkey from 2009 until January 2014. His other posts include Ambassador to Ireland, High Commissioner to Canada, Charge d’Affaires in Iran and UK Special Representative for Afghanistan.

Karabekir Akkoyunlu has recently completed a PhD in comparative politics at the LSE, where he researched political change in Iran and Turkey and taught classes on democratisation and Middle East politics. He was also a research associate at the Southeast European Studies at Oxford (SEESOX) working on Turkish foreign policy.

Photograph: EvrenKalinbacak / Shutterstock.com

In the early hours of 4 June 1989, soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on a pro-democracy protest in Tiananmen Square, killing untold hundreds of people. Twenty five years on, the event has been commemorated around the world, but how does China remembers this defining moment in the country’s history?

We will be joined by a panel including the award-winning journalist Louisa Lim, whose book The People’s Republic of Amnesia charts how events unfolded that night, revealing previously unknown details.

Whilst looking back, we will also trace the effect the crackdown had on society then and the impact it continues to have today. We will explore how the events of twenty five years ago have shaped national identity in China.

Chaired by Paul French, an author and a widely published analyst and commentator on Asia, Asian politics and current affairs. He is author of North Korea: State of Paranoia and the international bestseller Midnight in Peking.

The panel:

Louisa Lim as an award-winning journalist who has reported from China for a decade, most recently for National Public Radio. Previously she was the BBC’s Beijing correspondent. She is author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited.

James Miles is the outgoing Beijing bureau chief of The Economist, a position he took up in 2001. He will begin a new appointment in August as The Economist‘s China Editor, based in London. He is the author of The Legacy of Tiananmen: China in Disarray.

Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese novelist and filmmaker. She studied film at the Beijing Film Academy and published six books in China before she moved to London in 2002. She is author of Village of Stone, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth and most recently I Am China.

Photograph: nui7711 / Shutterstock.com