Educational Media Reviews Online

This disc is a compilation of 19 documentary shorts about the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011. From Oakland to Brooklyn, we meet leaders and followers of the cause—the distressed, the jobless, the energized, the angry are all given equal voicing on this disc. Perhaps it is worth noting that most of the shorts are currently available in their entirety on YouTube. It was difficult for me to keep my attention while watching all 19 shorts in a row, as some of the films were similar enough that they blended together and lost their unique messages. A couple of the films, however, had relatively narrow scopes and stuck with me. One of many shorts shot in New York teaches us the social etiquette and structure of the Occupy community, including a system of hand gestures that people use to communicate in large, noisy groups. In this short, and many others, a person stands on a box in a park and speaks his mind in short phrases—like a minister leading a couple in their wedding vows—and the hundreds of Occupiers who stand surrounding him repeat his words verbatim. This system of echoes is meant to act like a microphone, amplifying the words of one into a vocal force that can probably be heard very well by their targets inside. The Occupy movement was criticized for being too vague about its goals, and this compilation’s most valuable contribution is showing that the movement was something different for everybody—the woman from Cincinnati protesting big oil subsidies; the organic farmer from Maine who is concerned about sustainable agriculture; students who are crushed by loan debt and concerned about decreases in the quality of their education due to unfilled positions and increased class sizes; the Brooklyn family who resorted to squatting because they couldn’t pay their mortgage; and the gentleman with two master’s degrees who became homeless while trying to pay his medical bills. This disc brings their concerns together in one place and gives faculty ready access to focused coverage of the movement.