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We Are the Giant | Director Greg Barker
We Are The Giant
Attention, our audience’s and our own — it’s a valued commodity these days. We struggle to command our audience’s attention, for them to discover our work and then, once they’ve discovered it, to actually focus on it. Meanwhile, we struggle to focus our own attention, to fight our society’s weapons of mass distraction so we can not just see our work to completion but fully discover the meanings within it. What role does attention play in your work? Can you discuss an instance where you thought about some aspect of attention when it came to your film?
What a great question. I’m a pretty jaded guy, but I honestly believe some of the individuals whose stories we tell in We Are the Giant are truly historic figures, who will be written about decades to come, on par with Ang Sang Suu Kyi of Burma and even Nelson Mandela. Right now, however, they’re virtually unknown. Why? Because powerful and well-oiled forces don’t want you to know about them, and have successfully used their lobbying prowess combined with extreme violence to divert our attention elsewhere. My production team and I set out to right that balance, led by my extraordinary co-producer Razan Ghalayini. We made this film from the ground up: undercover, in secret and sometimes at great risk, because the inspiring and humbling people whose stories we tell in We Are the Giant not only deserve attention, they demand it.
[PREMIERE SCREENING: January 18 at 8:30 pm – The MARC, Park City]
