time once again for community form and we're very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning jen marlowe and not a lot of wadi jen marlowe is an author documentary filmmaker playwright and human rights social justice activist she is co author of the books i am troy davis and the hour sunlight and author of dar for diaries which is also the title of a documentary film she produced of the same name she is director and producer of the new documentary witness bahrain which premiered this week at the seattle transmedia independent film festival which will be talking about not a wadi is a bahraini journalist who was a reporter for  sought britain's most popular daily newspaper where she covered the pro democracy uprising in that country she is also co founder of the bahraini press association which seeks to protect journalists from oppression and she is also co producer of the documentary a spring jan and not a thank you very much for both coming and spending time with us this morning thanks for having us thanks mike so start out not if you would give us some history about the pro democracy movement that from i think most americans perceive that it started in two thousand and eleven you talk about that sure actually the demand for  people actually can vote for their these members after ten years of practicing that new system i'm talking about two thousand and ten everybody was it was very clear that this practice was not actively working even though we had all anything to do my job basically which is not as i'm i'm not an activist or of an opposition figure i am i'm just a joiner's who was trying to do my job interviewing people and telling their story so so i decided to leave i have been here and the states i'm based in d c for the past forty years and i was hoping that things would get better and and i would go back but things were actually getting worse and i'm not an exception i  mean there are so many of my colleagues journalists who actually had to leave the country for similar reasons so yeah i mean freedom of expression is kind of a meth now and behave and it doesn't really exist because local joiner's have been targeted in almost every single way and international journalists are not given permissions to enter visas to enter the country to report from the ground so basically there is a media blackout the story doesn't really get covered so people don't really know that this is still going on i mean i can see still say you know there are so many people who keep telling me oh is this still going on i mean we thought that this is over by now but it is pretty much still going  i got involved in bahrain in early two thousand and twelve there was a group of colleagues friends of mine who were putting together a team to enter bahrain for the one year anniversary of the uprising so the uprising  were hoping to retake the that place where pearl roundabout one stood which had since been demolished by the regime since it had become a symbol of the revolution and so friends of mine who were some among the founders of the international solidarity movement in palestine and who were some of the bahraini activists started really brainstorming with the bahraini activists about putting together a team of international solidarity activists who would go in ahead of those demonstrations and be able to both to both witness what happened and also perhaps be a protective element because the expectation was that that these marches could lead in a real bloodbath and if there were internationals there that might and the regime knew that that that might that might encourage them to to use a little less force and so i was actually invited to be a part of that initial team i wasn't able to go at that time because i was in the midst of writing the manuscript for i am trying day vests which was i think the last time i was speaking with you here in the studio and that book came out  but from that moment on i started playing very close attention to what a very close attention to what was happening to bahrain and i was already paying close attention to the so called arab spring and knew i wanted to be able to find some way to express support and solidarity the activists in the middle east who were struggling for their basic human rights and for their freedom and so that group of activists went when they all got into the country and they all got deported within most of them within days i think one of them managed to hang on for a week before before she was deported but they were most of them caught and deported within three or four days but then a few months later when i finished the first draft of the manuscript of my book that i was working on and i had i had a little bit of time at that point i reached out to the activists in bahrain and said you know is this still hopeful to you to have international presence and they said yeah definitely why don't you come so i ended up going in june two thousand and twelve several months after that first group but under the same premises as a solidarity activists to witness to and i'm really glad that i ended up going not with that initial group because i was able to i was planning to stay for three weeks i was deported at the end by but after i had stayed the full three weeks i was deported when i was leaving they called me at passport control so i was able to stay for the whole time i didn't intend to make a film that was not my intention  going at that just that just kind of happened while i was there one of the activists gave me a new i was a filmmaker and gave me a camera and i i thought i'd be writing some blog posts about what i witnessed i thought ok maybe i'll film some short interviews and do some put some things up on you tube but you know after several days of being there i realized that there were there were really powerful stories that deserved more more attention then than just a clip on you tube and and sort of in the middle of it all the sudden i realized i was making the film without ever having planned to do that there are several people in your film that are the focus one of whom we will mention by name but  you talk about so let's talk about the the woman that features primarily in the film so the woman who is primarily featured in the film a phenomenal woman she had been an investment banker and a pro government  when she really in two thousand and eleven when she really witnessed the bloodshed that the bahraini regime and she witnessed the crackdown that the bahraini regime was perpetrating she did a one eighty i mean she hadn't wanted to believe that that was happening she had wanted to see it but she went to the program and about saw with her own eyes and and that pushed her into doing human rights work should never been an activist before she had never considered herself to have anything to do with the field of human rights but she saw with her own eyes what was happening to her people and she felt that she couldn't stay silent so she contacted the bahrain center for human rights and she said i want to help however i can by the time i met her she was a fully committed activist and she was spending all her time trying to do a lot of what she was doing was the documentation of the stories of the doctors who had been detained and tortured that story of course is in the film doctors who had been detained and tortured because they had treated injured protestors at the programmed about and at the hospital and at the main hospital some of the hospital so that had been one of her areas of deepest involvement but when i met her i actually ended up staying in her home for most of the time that i was in bahrain and and we ended up traveling around the country together and that that in many ways became the film it was following this young woman as she was taking me around and as she was you know she was the one conducting the interviews she was the one doing all the speaking with people and i was just basically standing behind her with the camera and she is an extraordinary curry just so human being and barrin of similar to the u s but more active  uses surveillance heavily electronic surveillance so that came out in the film that she couldn't really meaningfully ask specific information over the phone knowing that that would be listened to and trac very very creative ways that people had of trying to get each other information and and everybody would use other do you know harder to monitor harder to harder to crack forms of communication but it was everyone knew that their cell phones were were being tapped and listened to and monitored and you know people were people were always very aware very aware of what to say so for example when a young woman that we were talking about would be talking about me to another activist if they if they had to make a phone call she would never say oh what time do you want to meet jen she would say oh that this that young woman who was at your house yesterday what time do you want to meet her and for her it was just second nature to know what to say and what not to say so that things would be detected or not detected i mean that the activists on the ground were experts at how to how to navigate the surveillance systems in order to still communicate the way they needed to actually and t via e mail to surveil activists behind activists and proved scientifically that these these links contains made where many of these activists by just clicking on that particular  some cases there were people who where and few hours after kind of clicking on that particular link the police were at their door in their houses and they were arrested and jailed so and actually it's i nteresting because that particular initiative found out that the software that the government is using is done by a german company gama and they contacted them and say that you are  selling this this surveillance software to governments to spy on activists and they denied that publicly but it was proven in several cases that this is actually the software i mean that in many cases the software that is used by their citizens so yeah i mean i agree i mean it's kind of very hard everybody knows that you know now that we have a political crisis that nothing is safe online a few tweet if you share insulting and it's illegal in bahrain by the way to insult the king and and by association to insult the regime so anything that they decide is insulting which could be any tweet that indicates criticism and he very clear in his emphasis of of support for nonviolent struggle and for peaceful struggle which which is really a hallmark of the of the bahraini revolution and and while when i was in bahrain we got notice that there were still several rushed right over to no bills house knowing that the police would be coming sometime that morning to take him away to prison and so i had the opportunity to conduct the final interview with him and then hit up stars in his house filming as the police came in and took him away and and took him to prison and that three month sentence ended up getting extended to two years because while he was in a prison the other charges that were against him those sentences came and so he ended up being in prison for two years all because of freedom freedom of expression and exercising what should be the international right of freedom of expression and freedom for peaceable assembly he got out of prison just this past june and was then detained again  october briefly for a few weeks then was released and then was arrested again just last month on april first second and and right now remains in prison so and again it was because of i believe the official charge or believe it was the cybercrime unit that arrested him and the official charge was spreading false information on twitter so bahrain is a country where your tweets can land you two years in prison  is a possibility of an up to ten year prison sentence right now with the different charges that are leveled against him and there are charges that are based on him practicing his right to freedom of expression and freedom of peaceable assembly and yet truth in tweets didn't seem to affect was it the government that sent out a tweet that involved you it was not i it was not officially the government but there are a series of there are  series of trolls basically that are all aligned with the government and it's very clear that there are you know that that they are supported by what exactly the details of exactly how the relationships between these trolls and the government works is a bit murky but it's very clearly connected in and that's how we learned that the government was fully aware that i was in bahrain and fully aware of what i was doing is they started sending out some tweets that involved me and and when we saw those tweets  the woman who i was profiling who we were traveling around together you know she and i began to see those tweets and realize that you know i covered them blown they knew i was here and at that point we realize we might you know we might only have a matter of time we never you know we never knew and now you hear helicopters overhead and you never knew if they were going to be who who was house they were raiding was it going to be the house where i was staying was i able to get all my footage  uploaded before they would come and raid that house or asked me because of course i had sensitive interviews with people that i needed to get uploaded and out of the country so every day we would go around filming and every night would be feeling like it was a race against the clock to get all the footage uploaded and then wiped off of you know off of the drive so that we weren't putting other people at risk so just just over five minutes left so talk about the uprising how it is a nonviolent uprising my impression is that women play a significant if not the leading part in the uprising and then if you could also talk about the u s role in all of this in five minutes try yeah i mean generally speaking the this spark to care up rising what happened and behind were was seen by everybody actually generally as a nonviolent uprising people  basically organizing themselves bringing in new tactics basically to raise their messages by just being very peaceful using the the methods that i mean many of the  when you see hundreds of thousands of people outside demanding something just marching that's actually quite powerful in fact many people know that this was actually the most popular uprising among that in the arab countries and in fact the majority of the population at many points went outside to demand this this change if it was a fraction of the population in egypt or order or syria or other countries it was actually the and she was forced she was actually dragged by the police to remove her from her location she was standing on that particular location just peacefully and the images were so powerful they went viral obviously they they were published by all the media and it shows because you know she's a woman and she's just sitting there and she is basically being dragged by the government and or by the police officers and the power of the power of these images shows how much you know people are really determined to raise their voices even though with with all this repression unfortunately even though we we know and believe that the  movement unfortunately that all was not as supportive as we have expected as behind these we always look at the united states as a country that is the values of democracy and human rights is in the heart of this particular nation and and the experience for this nation to rise as a as an international power is basically as it's rooted in these values and which is why when we see their  their reaction towards what what is happening in our country we we are actually disappointed actually with the with all the with all the statements that ok always mentions that their bahraini government is ally to the united states but there are human rights violations that have been committed here and there but then again there are no actual actions to support the change should support the people and their demands we do part and why the u s is not actually supporting any change we do realize that saudi arabia which is our neighbor which made it very clear that behind his territory is a very important  you mentioned that but i would say that we as u s citizens also have have a role here i mean our our government is set up at least in theory that we're able to we're able to let our concerns known to our representatives and the u s government who does back up the regime of bahrain we can let our representatives know that we we expect our government to hold the bahraini government accountable for their human rights violation and to implement true reforms i suggest for folks who want more information they should definitely go to the films let's website which is a witness bahrain dot com if folks want to take action on behalf of nebular rajab they can go to rights dot org there is currently a petition right now that the bahrain center for human rights is circulating to try to release and i think there's there's lots of ways that we in this country are responsible for what's happening in bahrain so therefore a lot of responsibility on us to citizens to make our voices heard about those aren't and are going to be other showings of witness bearing the next showing that's going to be in seattle is going to be and i don't have the details of this quite yet but it's going to be at seattle's arab fast at the end of august all right well with that we are unfortunately out of time i want to thank you both for coming and founding member of the group solidarity for all he has been a poet it is been politically active in the student movement the anti globalization and anti war movements both in greece and abroad and he was active in the communication group  the six square people's assembly he also works as a chief editor in the radical left publication house a cynic show and he is coeditor of the book democracy under construction and this was a huge movement that thirty percent almost thirty percent of the greek population accordingly to official estimates took part in this and movement and was organized in people's assemblies in the central squares of cities us consulting count of the greek people and we wanted you know to be parted to decide about the future of this of our society and this experience was important because it popularized the central square send it went to the neighborhoods then the solidarity active actions started in order either to block the implementation of their sterrett in measures and the restructuring programs or do  the movement started developing even further and now we have also the last one half year the foreclosure stopped campaign were groups of people go and stop the auctioning of houses have othe working spaces organized by workers in struggle because unfortunately in greece the trade unions they don't have any support mechanisms from even for their own members and imagine in this country that there has got official twenty six percent of unemployment ok this is not having any support structures and being thrown out of the social security system you know you cannot cope with your everyday needs so part of the do to understand itself as a movement and not as an individual fragmented kind of actions of solidarity and resistance in their own kind of neighborhoods so only my our first step it was a very simple one existed and we found out that in september two thousand and twelve there were one hundred and fifty s orry one hundred and eighty now there and they have been doubled by doing that we created to this common space kind of we want your tax form still they introduced process of discrimination because we know that the tax for our forms that don't reflect the do undo let's had to topple down the political system this corrupted political system that brought the bailouts in greece and decided to sacrifice you know the rights of the greek people for the is one of the conditions that is that enable people to be politically active and on the top of their decisions you know and and not be independent we don't want to replicate the system of the three million people almost thirty percent of the population doesn't enjoy access to the social security system or to the public health care services which is higher but i have to have to be honest and self critical again to try to impose an agenda or we want to have to fight for wages we have to fight for pain chances are the people despite the fact that it took on the streets for th the dictators ok so this movement it is a grassroots movement but the same time it is a very political movement and it gets but it is part it is a political agent of one of the political development with different public sphere we can say from below from the grassroots but they're open to the communities and to anyone but the racists and the so they self organize at the local community level as to who will participate in each individual co operative ok and it's interesting that you paint this movement that it is it is like the grassroots political solution i think here in the us when people hear about political they perceive political as going to a voting booth and supporting one of the two political parties or the third political parties that are so powerless in this country yeah yeah no no no because of the crisis those there was the equivalent of the republicans say here it became very old views that they stood for their you know for the same things and they protected the interests the you know the greek reach people the wealthy and they really they didn't have any options over the options they had they were either to turn one against the other ok to do something all together in order to build you know to resist t support themselves and build the basis for a different future and i think our intervention as active is there it was exactly to highlight or create these spaces and these tools that the people could come together because the people there were angry ok they were desperate for a solution bought the but but but what what is the solution is not you know is not something is not read the solution is not right you have to create it and even now something very important thing of this moment is that it is very same time it realizes exactly that what is important it is to have the power also to compete in the same in the same level let's say your opponent ok let's solve this why it needs greed this movement  a peculiarity that has god and i think this kind of leap forward from previous movement it is that does not play these does does not work with the hot on me between the social movement against you know the political power ok it tries to merge both by changing both ok by by rooting in the grass through the political struggle and also by wanting to remove those from power and this month the power towards you know the bases and i think you can see some examples and we've got some imagination and also with the problems that the has has some reflections on that from the latin american experiences and th that you have to take to do in the level of the state for example in my opinion we have to rephrase your fower in that sense so the question if i think we we ask the wrong question if we have to take seem this this fertile ground that you are creating with these three hundred sixty three hundred eighty organizations will be critical will be a critical feedback loop and the blackmail is because you know as a government that is not been in the government even a left party you have to open up a different process and you don't do you don't make politics as if you were a trade union fighting against the cuts of some think about politics even in the stay on the state level and i think this is where you know the contribution of the sort of darting movement that is important because we have this movement has developed different practices that personal connects with with a collective individual a problem with the problem of the country and also the social being socially active you know with the with the with the political struggle for change and  out and the government would not have the money to organize and pave the way you know of a different different public policies based on state funding ok so even in that case society or it will be a kind of a different more hybrid kind of contradictory process of chains so instead of pockets of resistance you're looking at creating the fabric of resistance here and you're going to be speaking in we only have a few minutes left going to be speaking here in seattle at a couple different venues and talking about the possibilities of helping to weave this fabric here in the u s as well yeah i