Picturing Resistance: Documentary Filmmaking, Storytelling Rights and Climate Activism

In this presentation, filmmaker and psychologist Jan Haaken discusses the methods behind her recent documentaries on climate resistance. She begins with background on how her documentary films grew out of her field studies and participatory action research (PAR) methods. Applying principles of PAR, the film project included collaborations with Indigenous communities at different phases of the production process. In this talk, she takes up the politics and psychology of documentary filmmaking, lessons from historical practices in ''extractive storytelling,'' and dilemmas that arose as this team of both non-Native and Native filmmakers set out to produce a story about allyship and creative legal strategies in the climate justice movement. To watch the trailers and for more information on the two-part film series NECESSITY Part I: Oil, Water & Climate Resistance and NECESSITY Part II: Climate Justice & The Thin Green Line, visit necessitythemovie.com.

Tea and coffee will be available in the Piano Lounge at 4:30 pm.

Janice (Jan) Haaken is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Portland State University, a clinical psychologist, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and the inaugural John Grace Memorial Filmmaker in Residence at Green College. She received audience awards at major film festivals in 2019 for her previous documentary, Our Bodies Our Doctors. NECESSITY was selected by the Doc Society NYC as part of the 2019 Inaugural Climate Story Lab where Janice Haaken and co-director Samantha Praus joined the lab as fellows. Janice also taught visual methods in the social sciences and screened a number of her films as a Fulbright Scholar at University College Cork in Ireland in the winter term 2020.

Prior to NECESSITY Part I: Oil, Water & Climate Resistance and NECESSITY Part II: Climate Justice & The Thin Green Line, she directed six feature films, including Our Bodies Our Doctors (2019), Milk Men: The Life and Times of Dairy Farmers (2016), Mind Zone: Therapists Behind the Front Lines (2014), Guilty Except for Insanity (2008), Queens of Heart: Community Therapists in Drag (2006) and Diamonds, Guns and Rice (2005). Her films focus on social problems that stir public controversy and on stressful jobs performed in liminal spaces and on the social margins. From refugee camps, war zones, psychiatric hospitals and abortion clinics to dairy farms, drag bars and hip-hop clubs, Janice’s documentaries focus on people working in various border zones and their insights on the world around them. For more information on her films, go to www.jhaaken.com.

Janice has also published extensively in the areas of psychoanalysis and feminism, the history of psychiatric diagnosis, the psychology of storytelling, group responses to violence, the dynamics of social change and documentary methods. Her books include Psychiatry, Politics and PTSD: Breaking Down (2021), Hard Knocks: Domestic Violence and the Psychology of Storytelling (2010) and Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory and the Perils of Looking Back (2000).