Title: #ChicagoGirl: The Social Network Takes on a Dictator
Country: US/Syria
Score: 7
19-year-old Ala’a
Basatneh, a Chicago resident and college freshman, says she used to spend her
time at the mall hanging out with friends. Now she runs a revolution in Syria
from her computer. She still has friends, but now they are a network of
activists, protestors and journalists ‘on the ground’ in a country she hasn’t
been to since she was 6.
Her contacts send
her news, photos and videos from the inside and she posts these on internet
outlets that many of her contacts don’t have anonymous access to and tries to
get them enough exposure to be covered by the mainstream international media.
She plans protest marches with built-in escape routes. She runs campaigns to
spread awareness in the US. She brokers between various anti Bashar al-Assad
groups that don’t necessarily know about or trust each other. In the course of
the documentary she deals with the death of two physically distant but very
close friends. She sees others give up on peace and resort to violence. Even on
US soil, she receives death threats from the foreign regime. This is not an
ordinary gal.
For me the moment
that really drove home ChicagoGirl’s shocking discipline and responsibility occurs
while she is trying to balance her college attendance with her activist duties.
She gets a text that a friend has been captured alive. Her job is to drop
whatever she is doing, even an ‘important’ exam, and log onto their social
media accounts (they trust her with their passwords), deactivating them before
their login credentials are tortured out of them and their networks
compromised.
#ChicagoGirl as a
documentary is interesting for two reasons: 1) because Ala’a Basatneh herself
is so interesting and the disjunction between her and American teens as we
typically think of them never gets old and 2) because of what this particular
example of online activism implies in a broader sense about social media, nonviolent
resistance, mass communication and political evolution. If the film doesn’t
quite break through into brilliance it is because it tries to tackle both the
personal story and the wider scope at the same time, but can’t quite capture
the latter.
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