DOCUMENTARY FILM ‘A FORCE MORE POWERFUL’ TO BE SCREENED AT HEADQUARTERS 10 OCTOBER

A special screening of the documentary film “A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict” will take place at United Nations Headquarters on Tuesday, 10 October, in the Dag Hammarskjöld Library Auditorium at 1 p.m. and 6:15 p.m. A co-production for PBS by York Zimmerman Inc. and WETA, Washington, D.C, the documentary was produced and written by Steve York with the collaboration of series editor Peter Ackerman. Mr. York has won numerous awards for his many documentaries for network and public television, including a 1994 Gold Hugo Award at the Chicago International Film Festival for “D-Day: The Soldiers’ Story”.

The film is based on the 1994 book Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century, by Peter Ackerman and Christopher Kruegler. Distinguished actor Ben Kingsley, who won an Academy Award for his film portrayal of Mohandas Gandhi, narrates the documentary. The film powerfully showcases six victorious non-violent campaigns that changed the course of history in the twentieth century: -- the 1960 Nashville, Tennessee campaign to desegregate the city’s downtown business district, which was emblematic of the American civil rights movement; -- Mohandas Gandhi’s famous Salt March of 1930, during which he enjoined Indians to protest the British salt monopoly -- a turning point in the movement that paved the way for India’s independence from Britain; -- the consumer boycott campaign against apartheid in the black townships of the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa in the mid 1980s, led by the young activist Mkhuseli Jack; -- the courage and endurance of Denmark’s citizens during the five-year Nazi occupation of World War II; -- the 1980 Gdansk Shipyard strike led by Lech Walesa which launched the Solidarity movement, and won Poles the right to have free trade unions; -- and the national protest days led by Chilean copper miners in 1983 against dictator General Augusto Pinochet.

“A Force More Powerful” highlights some of the most important non-violent movements of the last century from which crucial historical results followed: tyrants were toppled; governments were overthrown; occupying armies were impeded; and political systems that withheld human rights were shattered. As Desmond Tutu stated: “ When people decide they want to be free, once they have made up their minds to that, there is nothing that will stop them.”

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United Nations