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Directing Dissent
A film by Sophie Hamacher filmmaker in person
Directing Dissent is a film about John Roemer, teacher and social activist, and his decisions to either live within the law or have a sound basis for civil disobedience.
Roemer's story takes us through heated battles of the Civil Rights Movement and involves dramatic experiences in the fight to desegregate Maryland. As executive director of the Maryland chapter of the ACLU and as a forerunner in the American Friends Service Committee he has been described as a cowboy, an intellectual, and even a 'gun toting pacifist'.
Set in Baltimore, a city with a turbulent history of charged race relations, the film traces the protagonist's struggles within the Civil Rights Movement, his embracing of civil disobedience as a means of effecting social change, and the outgrowth of his activism into his role as a high school teacher. His ideology is informed by an unfaltering belief in the principles of non-violence and the power of "a loving disposition". The film is a character study of a loved and respected rebel as well as an exploration of the philosophy behind civil disobedience and the ways it can be applied today.
Sophie Hamacher (director), an artist and filmmaker from Berlin and Baltimore, works primarily with collage, reconfiguring media images by using documents and reclaiming them from their mere informative quality. She has written extensively on the relationship between art and document, and the unconscious or conscious witnessing of historical events through photography and film. She has directed, and written a collaborative film in Tehran, has co-curated the exhibition Überleben (2007), and is currently working on this documentary film. Her films have been shown in international video festivals and symposia in Cairo, London, Berlin and New York.
Johanna Schiller (co-producer) spent the last 12 years working as a DVD producer for the Criterion Collection. She supervised over 65 DVD releases of classic and contemporary films, including the work of Ingmar Bergman, Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini and Barbara Kopple, conducting interviews and producing documentary bonus features, recording and editing audio commentary tracks and overseeing all aspects of production. Highlights include a landmark box set Five Films by John Cassavetes and deluxe editions of Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage, Fanny and Alexander and The Seventh Seal. Johanna also produced DVD editions of the debut films of Lynne Ramsay, David Gordon Green and Noah Baumbach, and the first ever home video release of Barbara Kopple's Academy Award-nominated documentary, Harlan County USA.
