making the future while surviving a war this week on the laura flanders show we look at the women who are usually ignored in humanity's combat stories what happens when you refocus the lens we talk to two award winning filmmakers behind the hit series women war and peace which is now playing on public t v that's all coming up on the laura flanders show the place where the people who say it can't be done take a backseat to the people who are doing it wel women and conflict it's time to take a closer look what's actually going on in civil society in times of uprising and resistance and what role are women especially playing that may not make the news headlines but that doesn't mean they're not making the news in fact they may be leading they're probably leading in all sorts of ways the cameras rarely see what forms their leadership take and to what effect questions like these are at the heart of women war and peace to a four part film series that is streaming and playing on p b s stations it started this women's history month and all female cast of directors presented for stories about women who risked their lives for justice and peace and changed history we're pleased to have two of them here in studio giulia baggio a peabody and guggenheim award winning filmmaker and director of nile and the uprising of which more later and jean erotica an academy award nominated and emmy award winning filmmaker who directed the trials of spring and is also an executive producer of the series welcome both thanks for coming in thanks for having us have that too at the end been at war and peace to remind people this is part of a series that was a women more piece one there was indeed it was the theme it was well women in conflict in untold stories and i think that we kind of abby disney and i did a film called pray the devil back to health that was the last time you were here on the show it is indeed and it was the story of how women in liberia muslim and christian women banded together to end of fourteen year civil war and we realized that that was just one of many many many stories so we ended up doing a whole series and i remember at the time that we were doing it pam hogan was also one of the executive producers on it she went to paris and she went to the war museum in paris which is a museum that is an entire block long and three stories high there was not one image of the of a woman in the entire museum and so it's just a story we're just like this so many untold stories so after we did the first series we've now decide to come back with another one so you half way down the block you think we have a long way to  and peace could mean kind of anything i mean your approach could be women and women who are victims women who are peacemakers how do you sort of play out the theme or unpack the theme a little bit more than that i think i think that we put women at the center of stories and so that it's there i think too many stories are about women as victims and their through a very traditional way of looking at women but what we found is that women in conflict tend to deal with things like who's eating what how how what was what are people doing for water what are people doing for schools where in the whole kind of infrastructure is what women are left to handle and deal with and for that they often have the best ideas about how to bring peace so we just want to include them in the story let's play the trailer for the series and then we'll come to your film specifically which i found so critically important i can't wait to talk about it but this is the trailer for the series women war and peace to check it out two of the films the two of you were directly responsible also in the directing of let's talk about nail uprising first yes so i've been working for the past fifteen years with a nonprofit organization called just vision and we've been researching and documenting the work of palestinians and israelis who use nonviolent resistance to end the occupation and build a future of dignity and equality for both communities in the region the films that we've had made up until now and uprising were all about contemporary stories of individuals who were taking tactics from civil disobedience strategies that have been used all over the world to try to create a better reality on the ground and those activists who have been doing all of these actions over the past ten years took their inspiration from what was done in the first intifada in the late one nine hundred eighty s so we had been hearing over and over again that they wanted to see the story of the first intifada told for the first time on a future documentary and see their their stories and the movement that they built reflected in a motion picture so to take the american audience back going back to the one nine hundred late one nine hundred eighty s the image that most americans would have would be of young palestinian started in a refugee camp in gaza and it quickly spread to east jerusalem and the west bank as you said most people will remember sort of this simple image of a palestinian boy throwing a stone at a heavily armored israeli tank in reality though the first intifada was this very well organized and disciplined movement that involved all generations that involved all of the palestinian political factions and  women actively so when we started making the film we were really wanted to tell the story about the nonviolent organizing that took place and the level of orchestration that that took at the civil society level to to maintain it for four years where we didn't know and we found out during the research was that the reason why that had been such a disciplined organized movement was because palestinian women had been at the helm for much of it you tell the story of how many of the males men in leadership were actually deported leaving women in charge and in charge not just of strategy for the resistance but of keeping people out of keeping people's lights on in the time which was also one of incredible economic conflicts describe that part of the picture and yet during the early months of the uprising as the community row you know sort of started really getting organized and days really military understood that this wasn't something that was going to pass in a few days that dissuades different this was an insurrection was the word they were describing at the time they knew they had to find a way to crush it really quickly and they use sort of three main tactics they did mass arrests of all young palestinian man between the ages fourteen and twenty four that they found in the streets and they had to set up these massive prison makeshift prisons on the deserts  in the south of israel in the negev in order to house all of these men because they couldn't fit in the regular prisons they also deported the sort of top leadership and a way to dismantle were deported was very crude they were put inside helicopters the helicopters would fly out of israel would land in no man's land between israel and lebanon and they would just be left there and then the helicopter would fly away and many of the man were killed as well there was a lot of  ammunition used against the protesters on the early mosques and what happened was that a vacuum was left in the leadership which was the intention of the israeli army what they did and now was that there was a whole group of women who had been trained over now ten years of community organizing who were ready to take on the leadership and who are actually very prepared and had a vision for where they want to take and how common is this to the story that you've been telling across the series in the sense that it is often into that vacuum that women's leadership emerges even though women may have actually been filling that space for a long time but i think that our recognition of that about the fact that women haven't been doing that is that true that the media doesn't tend to look at those stories and particularly around conflict stories get to be told in terms of body counts and military battles but actually there's a whole lot of other things that happen during war people continue to exist and so i think that it's that we don't look at those stories in the israeli palestine story there was also the economic survival aspect of a boycott of israeli goods yeah let's play the trailer for nola uprising which begins to touch on this part of the film it has to do with the this is what the occupation is all about jews live under israeli civilian justice arabs are second class citizens in their own land so there's so much we could pick up on there the thing that i'd like to just address before we get into the question of what happens to all that extraordinary women's leadership and initiative and work is sometimes we take th when we talk about keeping society together being important we think of it a separate from the conflict or the work of peace and justice making i think what i got from the series and what i particularly get from the your film julia is that it is the peace and justice making and in this case it was actually the survival mechanisms that the women put in place that almost one the conflict that's right the palestinian women at the time they had a vision for how to start putting together the structures that could lead to an independent palestinian state and those structures included things like health care for the community so instead of relying on the hospitals that were controlled by the israeli military they actually set up  clinics to take care of people independently and not in a way that would put in danger the well being of injured people coming into hospitals it means making sure that people are fed and so in order to actually build independence from israeli projects communities were a captive market for to goods coming from israel they actually stablish the boycott of israeli goods and started setting up victory gardens which were gardens in people's backyards where they were and cooperatives where they would grow tomatoes and eggplants and start distributing it all of all of that by the way was illegal and you could be put in prison for ten years for doing any of these sick to similarly education and other core aspect of you were found with morgan three kids inside your living room and books were present you could be in prison for ten years because of that act so they were taking enormous risks wyo really creating and  it means to be part of a society and and building equality for women inside of that society let's talk about trials of spring not unrelated i mean one of the connecting points there was again how do we provide a service the people need that also liberates people in this case people in protests trying to defend themselves against assault and rape join just introduce travis bring a little bit and how you found your central character sure  brings basically the story of the theo who is a young woman from a village in egypt who very conservative family she kind of sneaks out of the house and begins to take place take part in the demonstrations that were we all know a story of squared i mean arab uprising and her family had no idea that she was participating in till she got arrested and beaten and tortured and then they came to get her and then proceeded to punish her for taking part in all that so the charges that were against her then continue on through the courts for three years and her story is really a microcosm of what happened to egypt because during the early days it was just incredible euphoria that people talked about like being in tahrir square and feeling like there were one organism that there was incredibly unity and that really begins to split international women's day which unfortunately women went down to to demonstrate for women's rights which was only a month after mubarak fell and immediately they got pushed back and the pushback came not only from islamists but came from some of their fellow demonstrators that it was get out get out get out get out and it was that that moment that the army decides they're going to break up all the protesters and so hence story very much parallels what happened what happens in egypt let's check out  the demonstration that she took part in and sentenced to life in prison because she was tried in absentia she was able to leave the country before she was brought in and she's now living in i states and so she is still working very much on behalf of other people in egypt and the number of people that have gotten into prison since sisi took power is not sixty thousand people are human rights defenders are in jail  is baby when the first intifada they say can place and he ends up actually having to go into prison with her when nihilism arrested because he's an infant and he's still breastfeeding and felt very ill when she is captured in and held for six months in prison and he's now a lawyer in canada and still very active on women's issues as well as national liberation issues and how does she and her cold war that you depict in the film make sense of what happened after the first intifada after the madrid talks the all slow agreement the civil society organizations the had created more or less being written out of the picture yeah the first intifada after about three years created a political space internationally and in the united states that we have not seen since since then so what happened was that by the time that the protests had kind of achieved its full potential and there was a lot of organizing a lot of pressure against the attacks that the israeli army were committing against protesters george bush sr who was the president at the time did something that no president in the united states has done since and no president had done up until him which is that he threatened to withhold loan guarantees from israel loan guarantees or one of the ways that the united states has for decades now provided financial assistant assistance to israel so he threatens to have hold that financial assistance unless israel stops building settlements in the west bank settlements are illegal transfer  civil population into occupied territories a violation of international law and for decades the united states has been financially supporting that effort george bush was to first want to say if you want our contributions to your country you need to stop violation violating international law and that created momentum for to first peace agreement to take place so this was the first time the palestinians were invited to negotiate directly with israel  opposed to in prior negotiations like the camp david accords where palestinians were represented by jordanians or by egyptians because they weren't considered a nationality they were just arabs that could be folded into a jordanian nation or an egyptian nation and i wasn't invited to the table nine a was invited but her colleagues were so the first negotiation in madrid which marked the beginning of that process actually included many palestinian women including zahir to come out  was undercut by a secret negotiation between israel and the p l o which was at the time based in tunisia and had to become concerned that day were losing their political power over the palestinian cause because so many of the palestinian leaders from the west bank and gaza were now representing the palestinian cause directly in the international stage so in flies bill clinton to the not rescue people who have to see the film to get the full story i urge them to watch i urge you to watch it on public television or stream at the website conclusions from us do you have an e about sort of biologically determined roles for women or otherwise you trying to make a point women better men not so good no i'm not trying to make their point i think that we but women being absent it's bad for all of us in that we have women have something different to bring to the table they have different points of view it's not biologically better and it's kind of like kind of even don't like getting into that discussion because the that really is a proven fact that when women are part of the negotiating table that the peaceful last longer it's also that the signs of democracy are the greater representation that women have which is kind of obvious as for fifty percent of population the greater democracy will be and so those are just it's just the way that it is and so we want to tell those stories through it i think that it's really critical forward to future generations of young women that they get to see the stories of the women who actually have led movements historically around the world represented on the screen because we are now seeing a resurgence of women's activists and around the world  including the united states and we need to learn lessons from what worked what didn't the fact that a palestinian movement was undercut and now we're left with the ongoing injustices in the region is something that we need to learn from why did that happen let's not let that happen again let's build political power while we are doing our grassroots movements so that we can actually create long term sustainable democratic countries all right the series the second series women war  wo is airing on streaming at p b s i want to thank you both for coming and it's great talking to you and i can't wait to see the rest of the series thank you thank you so much for having