Editor’s note: For Veterans Day, we wanted to repost this piece from August about a phenomenal documentary, The Way We Get By, which premieres tonight on PBS. A few updates:

-The filmmakers have launched an incredible partner site, Returning Home: Mosaic of Support, which allows users to express support for the troops by uploading personal photos, videos, audio and written messages. You can contribute here.

-Congratulations to the filmmakers, Aron Gauet and Gita Pullapilly, who were married last month. Read their story, and how the film came to be, in the NYT announcement here.

-Here’s the review posted by our film blogger Gina after she screened it at the Nantucket Film Festival in June.

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Meet the “troop greeters,” three senior citizens who have made it their personal mission to thank returning and departing soldiers.

Equipped with Thank You signs, handshakes, and hugs, Jerry, Joan, and Bill are often the first faces soldiers see as they step off the plane and perhaps the only thank-you that some soldiers get. And they never miss a flight. This is the premise of the emotionally-charged film The Way We Get By.

As the story expands beyond the airport, it becomes a painful and necessary reminder of how our culture often casts aside not only our soldiers, but also our elderly.

For six years the greeters have welcomed over one million soldiers into a tiny airport in Maine, but outside the airport, they’ve independently struggled with loneliness, poor health, and the isolation that often comes with aging. Trailer after the jump. Read the rest of this entry >>

Come December, the world’s leaders will gather in Denmark to address what is perhaps the single most important and urgent issue of our time—climate change. There’s just 32 days left until the summit begins, and were doing everything we can to demand real results from COP15. That’s why we’re excited to be powering Hopenhagen.org, the official Web site of the Hopenhagen movement.

Here’s what you can do to TakePart in the Hopenhagen movement:

-Become a citizen of Hopenhagen by signing the petition at Hopenhagen.org

-Read the latest entries in the Voices from Hopenhagen series from environmental activists Laurie David and Ed Begley, Jr.

-Add your voice to the Repower America wall to demand clean energy solutions from global leaders.

-Spread the word to your network: Become a fan on Facebook and follow @hopenhagen on Twitter.

Kristin Bell sporting the Guess Invisible Children T-shirt at last night's event in Beverly Hills.

I’ve got to admit, Kristin Bell impressed me last night. I had heard of her involvement with the nonprofit organization Invisible Children but had looming doubt that she—or any of the other celebrities lending their name to the cause—truly understood the politics behind the 24-year-long war in northern Uganda and the urgent need to end the rule of the Lord Resistance Army’s rebel leader, Joesph Kony. I was wrong.

Invisible Children co-founders Laren Poole and Bobby Russell.

Bell, who co-hosted a Vanity Fair event last night with Rachel Bilson and Pete Wentz at the Guess flagship store in Beverly Hills, answered the reporter’s questions with heart and a true understanding of the politics and plight of the children in the war-torn region, who live in constant fear of being abducted and forced to kill or be killed. The event marked the launch of a new line of organic T-shirts (the cotton is grown and harvested in Uganda) that will benefit Invisible Children.

The situation in northern Uganda is one of the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, Bell said, citing the UN Ambassador for Humanitarian Affairs. (I’m telling you, the girl knows what she’s talking about.) The organization, which we featured earlier this year ’cause they’re so amazing, was started after three young filmmakers traveled to Africa in 2003 ‘in search of a story.’ What they found both “disgusted and inspired” them. After returning to the US, they made the documentary Invisible Children: Rough Cut, which showed the reality of the children caught in the midst of the civil war. So, what does this movement say about the power of media? Read the rest of this entry >>

Filmmaker Joe Berlinger. Photo: Ali Pflaum

I was first introduced to the term “paradox of plenty,” also known as the “resource curse,” last month when reading Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil in advance of my interview with the author, investigative journalist Peter Maass. He writes in the introduction that the resource curse “…posits that countries dependent on resource exports—especially oil but also natural gas, diamonds and other minerals—are susceptible to lower growth, higher corruption, less freedom and more welfare. As the graffiti I saw on a pipeline in Ecuador’s Amazon region stated, “Más Petróleo = Más Pobreza”—more oil equals more poverty.”

A new documentary film of a similar title, Crude: The Real Price of Oil, closely examines the Oriente region of Ecuador that Maass visited while researching for the book. The paradox is starkly evident in this region, once a pristine rainforest area that since the discovery of oil in the 1960s has become the site of what some say is the largest environmental disaster in the world—30 times the size of the 1989 ExxonValdez oil spill, the plaintiffs’ lawyers claim.

The pollution from three decades of oil extraction by Texaco has led to the plight of generations of Ecuadorians who call themselves “Los Afectados” or “the affected ones.” More than 30,000 Los Afectados are suing Chevron, which bought Texaco in 2001, for $27 billion in damages. Chevron lawyers claim that the $40 million remediation agreement in the mid-nineties absolved them of any further liability.

Since I first wrote about the film in March, it’s won a number of awards in addition to enjoying critical acclaim from the New York Times, The Hollywood Reporter, and Variety, among others. I spoke with director Joe Berlinger via email about the film, his approach to advocacy filmmaking, and whether there’s light at the end of the, er, pipeline.

Q. How does your style of filmmaking, which strives to tell all sides of a story, encourage activism? Do you consider yourself an activist? A storyteller? A journalist?

A. I consider myself a storyteller first and a journalist second, although that does not mean I take my journalistic responsibilities lightly. And while I think all documentary filmmaking is inherently subjective, there are certain lines one cannot cross when working in nonfiction, such as manipulating chronology or the glaring omission of key facts. As a storyteller, I am also looking to graft classic narrative structure onto a real life story, so I consider myself more of a chronicler of the human condition than an activist. That said, in trying to reach people emotionally, I think my films encourage activism, but not in the traditional sense of the word. I want to inspire people to take a fresh look at the world around them, and that encourages activism on many levels – whether it inspires people to make films, or get involved in a legal case, or challenge stereotypes and see people in a new light.

For me, a balanced approach to telling a story in which all sides have their say is the best way to encourage this kind of activism because I believe it is a more persuasive style of filmmaking. Specifically, I avoid a singular point of view and I eschew voice-over narration and other techniques that tell an audience exactly how to think about a subject. I believe the best way to serve the truth is to explore a situation from all sides without overtly revealing the filmmaker’s viewpoint, allowing each audience member to come up with his or her own conclusion about the events they are witnessing on screen. This is the opposite approach of the standard environmental and human rights advocacy film in which a single point of view is clearly conveyed, an approach that risks preaching to the converted instead of winning new people over through the active process of weighing the pros and cons. When a single point of view is repeatedly conveyed to an audience, it is a passive experience for the viewer and often less emotionally engaging. When the audience is forced to weigh the pros and cons of a situation, it is a more active viewing experience and therefore ultimately more persuasive when the audience decides to embrace the advocacy that is being expressed by the film. I believe it’s through allowing for and encouraging this kind of emotional commitment from the viewer that a film can inspire a greater level of activism. Read the rest of this entry >>