Michael Moore, the legendary documentary filmmaker, was the star of the New Haven Documentary Film Festival May 30 to June 9. He is an unlikely David battling gigantic Goliaths in hopes of changing the world. With courage, he has taken on the auto giant General Motors (Roger & Me), school shootings (Bowling for Columbine), the Bush administration after 9/11(Fahrenheit 9/11), capitalism (Capitalism: A Love Story), health care (Sicko), invasions (Where to Invade Next), voting issues and Electoral College (Fahrenheit 11/9) and more.
The audience for each film was privileged to hear him expound on his theories after each showing. For thirty years, since 1989, Moore has raised an alarm where he felt necessary in order to educate and make the world better. He admitted he was naïve enough to believe that his award winning film Bowling for Columbine would stop school shootings. Tragically he was wrong. He made the decision to make the film only three hours after the shootings and feels you could show it today without any changes being made. What progress have we made in 17 years?
Moore would like nothing better than to be irrelevant, and remove the need for his documentaries. Even when he was a baby, people said “Here comes trouble, baby,” and it hasn’t changed. His family claims he was born with an adult head. He has always loved movies and saw 3 or 4 a week. He calls those movies “My film school.” Ironically, he credits a beatnik with instructing him in how to make a film for only one week. Later he learned the beatnik’s mother and Barbara Bush were sisters.
Living in Flint, Michigan, the closing of the General Motors plant put him in pursuit of Roger Smith, the company head. He wanted answers for why Smith caused this working class devastation, moving plants to Mexico and scoring record wealth for G.M. in the process. He wanted the film to be “unforgettable,” seeing unemployed workers evicted on Christmas Eve. To see America in trouble, not for entertainment but for education. To “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” In Flint, the 80,000 workers are now only 5000 in number.
With “Bowling for Columbine,” so named because the two teenaged shooters went bowling that morning before their rampage, he doesn’t want those children to have died in vain…there or at Newtown or Parkland, or anywhere. Gun deaths in America are thousands greater than any other country. He has already talked to three sets of parents in Newtown who want to help him make a more graphic film of gun violence to shock change.
He wants people to be responsible, to inspire you to do something, to make you think, by creating a whole new level of filmmaking.
Michael Moore, just a man in a baseball cap, needs to tell stories to initiate change. He was able to get K Mart to stop selling bullets, by bringing two boys from Columbine to headquarters who still had bullets embedded in their bodies that can’t be surgically removed. He confronted Charlton Heston , the head of the NRA, who felt no responsibility for gun violence.
Moore doesn’t feel he is brave. He also “doesn’t believe we can fix any of these problems” but that doesn’t mean he won’t try. He gave an analogy that if you only had a Dixie cup in a boat that sprang a leak, in order not to die you would still use that Dixie cup to empty the water out.
To Moore, “we are a nation founded on genocide and greed and we need something to go to our souls.” He wants to be “the camera with a conscience.” He feels he has no choice, to be selfless for strangers, and he wants you to be selfless too…as if you were part of the French Resistance. Right now, he is helping a friend do a film on climate change, warning “we are out of time,” and need to see not only what is happening right in front of us but on the sides, to see the whole picture.
Moore is telling us we “can’t use excuses to not be active, for our family, neighbors or ourselves.” We must believe it so strongly, we are willing to die for the cause.
We are the majority, the 70% that includes blacks, women and young people who need to stand up and vote for anyone but the present administration.
Michael Moore has devoted his life to create change for the better. Listen to his words, pay attention to his films and work with him to save our planet.
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