May 2 at 7:30 pm – Town Hall; Needham, Mass. Hosted by the Needham Human Rights Committee (more info | press)

May 16 at 6:00 pm – King’s College; London, United Kingdom. Hosted by the International State Crime Initiative (more info)

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Check out this piece in the New Haven Independent, featuring VLP’s own Tom Maher, Ivy Wang, and Eric Parrie. Production has just begun on VLP’s latest film, an in-depth profile of the New Haven Police Department. More news on this exciting project to come!

http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/lights_…_cameras_…_community_policing/

Created by: http://www.open-site.org/

The Worst of the Worst will be released in Autumn 2012. Watch the trailer here: https://vimeo.com/41050642

Yale Visual Law Project Inaugural Year

Welcome, everyone. My name is Valarie Kaur, and I’m the director of the Yale Visual Law Project. It is my great pleasure to welcome you tonight to this special advanced screening of the first-year films of the Project. First, I’m going to tell you a little bit about our grand experiment. Then we’ll share our films with you and invite the whole team up for a rich discussion about the films, what we learned in our first year, and the role of visual advocacy in the legal field.

So what is the Yale Visual Law Project?  As many of you know, I came to law school three years ago as a filmmaker.  In the first week of school, I shared my film in this very room with many of you.  Back then, I spoke about the legal field and classrooms like this one as fighting rings, where we would wield the law to beat our opponents with our arguments.  I saw filmmaking as a way to melt that fighting ring into a circle around a fire, where we would tell stories that changed hearts and minds from the inside.  Both were different ways to effect change and advance justice.  I saw them as opposed.  It wasn’t long before this changed: I saw stories all over the law, storytelling coursing through the life of our cases and arguments and briefs.  The legal field is a site for narrative contestation, a battle of storytelling.  But I also saw the absence of stories.  The stories of people who most bear the consequences of the law, their faces and voices are often left out of legal analysis and debate.  So that gave rise to the question: if law is about narrative contestation, and film best makes vivid buried stories, how can we better use film in the legal field, both inside and outside the courtroom, to advance the public interest?

Last spring, a group of students gathered in my apartment down the street to answer just that question by workshopping a crazy idea – a pilot program that would explore the intersection between law and film.  We didn’t approach filmmaking as a mere translation tool, translating what was on the page to the big screen.  Rather we wanted to take seriously film as a form of knowledge production that added something new and valuable.  We started by looking at filmmakers like Errol Morris and Fred Wiseman and others, who were making legal arguments through their films.  Then we turned to the legal field, and we noticed that in the last decade, visual and digital technologies have transformed the practice of law, and it’s still changing before our eyes.  Lawyers are using videos to present evidence, closing arguments, and victim-impact statements.  Outside the courtroom, lawyers are turning to viral videos to advance public education campaigns, from Guantanamo detentions, to gay marriage, to immigrants’ rights.  And we have seen legal scholars, including some of our professors, debating their ideas on film in the legal blogosphere or venture into collaborations with documentary filmmakers.

We now have a media-saturated profession.  So everyone’s doing it.  But no one is really teaching it or reflecting upon it.  Most law schools aren’t teaching students to make arguments through video and images, otherwise known as visual advocacy, as part of our education.  We learn legal research and writing; what about learning, critiquing, exploring visual advocacy as part of our legal education?

So we students put together an ambitious proposal for a program that would do just that.  In collaboration with teaching fellows, filmmakers, and others who generously devoted their time and energy, we developed a year-long inter-disciplinary course integrating legal theory, film theory, and production skills for law students.  We aimed to produce high production value films on legal issues.  Dean Robert Post, Megan Barnett and Professor Jack Balkin heard our vision, believed in us, and gave us a home in the Information Society Project, and said GO.

Over the course of the year, nine students and three teaching fellows traveled what has felt to be an epic journey together.  We met formally every Wednesday night for two hours.  The first hour, theory; the second hour, practice.  In the first hour, we watched films and read articles and had rich discussions about the intersections between film and law with students, faculty, and renowned guest speakers, including award-winning filmmakers.  In the second hour, we rolled up our sleeves and got to work.

Law students who had little or zero film experience last September became writers, directors, and producers.  Students produced legal memos, story outlines, pre-interviews and interviews, production shoots.  They learned how to operate a camera, set up lighting and sound, shoot original footage, and edit films on Final Cut Pro.  They learned how to work in partnership with professional cinematographers and editors. We weren’t teaching students to become filmmakers – this is a law school, not film schools – but we were equipping students to partner with professional technicians on film projects.

So keeping up with our robust curriculum would have been enough.  And producing films with first-year students would have been enough.  But in addition, students became board members who did the development, distribution, outreach, communications, and finance work to help build the foundation for the project inside YLS.  We have been toiling away!  And we haven’t shared much with the law school publicly, because we knew we were still experimenting.  But tonight, we made it.

At our retreat at the beginning of the year, I used the analogy of a ship.  Filmmaking is fundamentally collaborative, I said.  So this project would feel like navigating uncharted waters together in exploring visual advocacy, and like a crew on a ship, we would need one another.  It’s been a truly tumultuous journey.  We’ve weathered entirely unexpected storms, many that we hadn’t quite been prepared to weather.  And along the way, we realized that we were building the ship as we sailed!  Literally building a structure that would support our filmmaking projects.  And we did it.  It hasn’t been easy.  We are back at the shore, so to speak.  And we are ready to show you what we found.  So tonight, we are pleased to share with you our first-ever films of the Yale Visual Law Project.

Excerpted from remarks by Founding Director Valarie Kaur at the Visual Law Project’s inaugural film screening on Tuesday, April 25, 2011.

In the ensuing screening and discussion of our films, we focused on two sets of questions: What are we most struggling with in our latest cut? And how can we make our films better in the coming weeks as we prepare to screen footage for faculty members, the dean of the law school, and eventually other students? We focused on three specific questions: How can we cut the film down to a more manageable size? Is it missing a strong counter-argument? Is it clear what the argument in the film is?

We screened the immigration team’s film first. What follows is a short sampling of comments given by various guests and students.

The film came alive the moment we saw Ernesto. Until then, it felt a bit like fishing: a lot of static shots, a lot of moving shots, shadows, no idea where things were going at first. The strongest thing you have are the people – they just pierce your heart. I would decrease subtitle size, and add a drop shadow. As one human being listening to another human being speak, this is what matters – trying to see into a person, and seeing his family. Father taking his two kids out into the park; they’re just people, you’ve seen them on the street, they’re not an abstraction. The mother. That just tugs at your heart.

Initially, I wanted to know: who are these people? What is their deal? Towards the end, I realized that it doesn’t matter. In terms of getting the other side onscreen, I don’t know if you need an interview, but you need to give the other side a voice, or a quote from Janet Reno, or a video from Bush. This can also be supplied by non-institutional voices. But if you’re showing negative signs and anti-immigration snippets, you need to give context to those. Also, I don’t think the city of Baltimore needs to be a character; you can make this more like Anytown, USA.

Can we supply any background information about when Ernesto came to the US? You want to establish him as someone who didn’t just jump the fence four months ago, who has been here for awhile.

One way to direct this might be to a build from a wall of bad but rational-sounding arguments, to full-out anti-immigration advocacy (as an inciting incident), towards the crashing down of the wall. It’s important to show what’s at stake in the film.

Also you may want to move the quote about violence done against a non-polity towards the end. The point slips by when it’s at the beginning. Of course, there’s still a need to preserve the legal argumentative structure of the film.

As opposed to a larger structure, like the olocaust, where you’ve got an incredibly large event and you need to narrow down to the human stories that are part of that structure, in this situation, you’ve got an incredibly human story and you need to magnify it to explain the depth and breadth of what’s at stake.

We then screened a draft of the criminal team’s film. Again, here are some comments and reactions from the conversation about this film that followed our screening.

It would be useful to have experts weigh in at various junctures in the film, particularly where certain personal claims are made by the film’s subject that could be extrapolated to a broader audience. You can weave your expert and empirical clips into the documentary as it’s already structured, so that you have three parts that complement the others. It’s a very important structural technique to go from anecdotal to empirical to the broader claims you are making. Take one person’s human story, put the science and the facts to it, and you can take it beyond the one person’s story at the same time you humanize the science and empiricize the anecdote.

It’s also fine for the project to be experimenting in making different sequences available online, and giving viewers the option to choose which tracks they want to see.

I was not bothered by the lack of family context for the film’s main character; he was easy to look at, very thoughtful about what he had to say. It was very evocative.

As you’re watching the documentary, you think: wouldn’t it be neat if they explored that further? And the answer for many PBS documentaries is that many of these separate pieces are online. So you can do the same, and put extra footage online.

*****

Summarizing these discussions, we discussed our obligations to the truth and the ways in which we can make our points strongly, both as legal advocates and even as visual storytellers, while still adhering to the truth. We thought also about various emotional triggers that we can use to give our films more resonance.

Thanks to our guests and to members of the Visual Law Project for another great meeting and conversation.

Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa

Rashomon raised a number of questions relevant to our own filmmaking experiences.

Given that our films are narrated and contextualized by people with a certain point of view, what are our obligations to some larger kind of truth, as opposed to the immediate truths of these peoples’ experiences as they see them and as they accounts for such experiences? Since our filmmaking strategy is partially based upon juxtaposing multiple partial perspectives, we drew many parallels between the structure of Rashomon and the structure of our films — in particularl, the immigration team’s film, which involves a juxtaposition of (a) the raw video of an immigration raid with (b) the perspectives of people who were subject to this raid, along with (c) the perspective of police officers involved in the raid and (d) the perspectives of immigration law scholars.

When we don’t have a personal stake in a given issue in our film, how do we juxtapose the different claims made around this issue by the people in our films? Or is it impossible to detach our personal beliefs from the issues we are filming? And how do we account for our films’ viewers‘ beliefs and experiences, and shape our film in the context of those experiences?

In Rashomon, Kurosawa used certain cues and techniques to suggest that a certain account of the story was the more objective account – specifically, he used music during the three “subjective” accounts and no music during the final witness’s account. We discussed how we could use sound (or lack of sound), lighting, and montage to convey lower and higher degrees of truthiness. For instance, we can use certain musical techniques as leitmotifs to identify not just certain emotions in our films but also certain broader character arcs. This can sometimes verge on the cheesy if used in too obvious a way, but it can be an essential technique in documentaries and is often employed by Errol Morris and others. We also need to be attentive to how we use backgrounds to grant (or deny) objectivity to our interview subjects, and to whether we are using any of these techniques, intentionally or not, to sow doubt regarding our characters.

In response to claims made about the didacticism of some public media and simplified message/issue pieces, we talked about how ambiguity can serve to engage the viewer in some cases without detracting from the main point or theme of a film. We need to think about how to preserve this ambiguity while keeping certain truths (and our larger narrative arc) clear. Ambiguity can open up a specific experience so that it attracts broader themes and a broader reading, enabling the audience to see different things from a production. We can move from a generally relatable story to the audience’s own experience with similar stories – and remember that the most important thing in any kind of advocacy piece is to maintain a balance between taking viewers through a story without hitting them over the head with the question of how they are connected to the story. We also noted that adding complexity and critical thought to public discourse can be a positive outcome in itself. And even if a viewer comes to the “wrong” conclusion, we will still be able to show that viewer the real human experience of someone in the film.

Valarie then described her own storytelling model with a diagram of a multi-point circle based upon her experiences in making Divided We Fall:

• identifying issues to explore;
• interviewing subjects and drawing near to them – and to some extent putting aside predetermined issues and frameworks for the time being, in order to help make filmmakers and interview subjects fully human towards one another;
• then, withdrawing from the immediacy of the subjects in the editing room and cutting/balancing these stories in service of certain themes (and juxtaposing multiple accounts of these themes);
• next, trying to determine what is at stake for the audience;
• and finally, determining how to prompt the audience towards some kind of action.

The remainder of our meeting was devoted to a discussion of the structure of our course for the spring semester, and how we hoped to develop our films over the next several months. This spring, the emphasis of our meetings will shift away from discussions of reading and background material, and towards production.

In the interest of focusing on filmmaking during the coming semester, we then set up several group timelines around dates at which we hoped to complete sequences in our films and submit them to one another and for faculty review. We planned to finish a rough version of our films by March 22, and a final version of our films by April 26, the date of our last meeting of the academic year, for final screening purposes. We also discussed prioritization and division of labor within our teams as to camerawork, editing, and expert interviews.

At the conclusion of our meeting, we emphasized how happy we were about all the time everyone had devoted to the class, and looked forward to the prospect of devoting even more energy to the Visual Law Project over the next several months.