WORLD PEACE is a Local Issue
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Making of
More than 25 years ago, I took my brand new inexpensive home video camera, and decided to shoot a Palo Alto City Council Meeting on a VHS cassette. I'd never filmed anything before in my life. I felt that this meeting might be interesting, and since I had no film team nor access to good equipment, I took myself and my new "toy" and shot the meeting (with no external microphone except the one that was built into this little camera).
The agenda focused on a discussion of whether or not Palo Alto should support a nuclear freeze resolution. The Mayor and the majority of the council felt that support of a nuclear freeze was not an appropriate issue for a local city council. The discussion that took place that evening, as it turned out, was an historic moment.
The citizens of Palo Alto showed up, 300 of them, and as a result of their presence, and the ways in which they spoke to the Council, the final vote - a triumph for the power of democracy in action - confirmed that the City of Palo Alto would go on record in support of the nuclear freeze resolution.
Though I have made many films since this one on the threat to reproductive rights, the invisibility of stolen elections, recovery from spinal cord injury and more, this film may well be the most important film I will have ever made.
Transcription
Full script for WORLD PEACE is a Local Issue - pdf or Word doc
Synopsis
WORLD PEACE is a LOCAL ISSUE -- shown to both Houses of Congress and broadcast on PBS stations nationwide -- documents a Palo Alto City Council meeting to which 300 people showed up to speak their minds about the issue of declaring the city a nuclear-free zone. During the meeting, the Council shifts from tabling the issue indefinitely to voting in support of a Nuclear Freeze Resolution.
Credits
Director: Dorothy Fadiman
Executive Producer: Frank Spencer
Assistant Producer: Phyllis Cole
Project Coordinator: Victoria Nichols
Music: Alex de Grassi
Events
'Art From Ground Zero' events (by the Morning Call)
"Palo Alto screened World Peace Is a Local Issue, a documentary filmed during a city council meeting in which peace activists persuaded the council to adopt a resolution for a nuclear freeze." In "Peace & Freedom: Magazine of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom" See PDF PeaceAndFreedom2003Winter.pdf