call and response

One of our favorite things about our work is learning how Social Citizens are using their creativity, idealism, and digital fluency to support their causes every day. To share some of these great stories, we're starting a new series called "Social Citizen Sightings." If you see a Social Citizen, we would love to hear about what they're doing too. Just fill out this quick form with their name, affiliation and 150 words or less on what makes them a Social Citizen.

Call+Response is a film that uses music and prominent cultural and political figures to draw attention to the reality that there are more slaves today than ever before. The film’s director, Justin Dillon, is now focusing on using the film to promote community-based activism to abolish slavery. Justin, the subject of our first Social Citizen Sighting, spent a few minutes talking with me about his background, his work, and his vision for Call+Response.

Name: Justin Dillon

If you had to describe yourself in one tweet, what would it be? @justindillon social justice anarchist//change flows from the bottom up

Most recent ipod playlist: Jeff Buckley, Delta Spirit, the Ting Tings…and a few guilty pleasures from Lady Gaga

What are you reading: Muhammad Yunus’s Creating A World Without Poverty

You’ve said you never intended to make a film, so how did you end up creating a documentary to respond to modern-day slavery?
I don’t tend to think in purely linear forms, and that’s found its way into the way we work at Fair Trade Pictures and Fairtrade Fund. We very seldom look for permission and then move. I tend to move forward and then look for the resources to make it work. I’m not saying that’s the way everyone should be, but when you’re trying to do something as audacious as making a film, or more important, making a difference, it’s really hard to find permission, approval and resources right off the bat.

I think that style of working comes from being a songwriter. You know you want to create something that says a certain thing or creates a certain feeling, so you sit down with your piano or guitar and work it.  But once you bring it to the band, it’s always something different than what you started with, and that’s what happened with the film. I knew I needed to point a large part of my life to this injustice because I couldn’t get it out of my head. I was flabbergasted that this was going on and that the general public knew nothing about it. To me, this issue just seemed solvable.   It’s an issue of focus, and if enough people focus on it, it will change.

I started with what I know, which is music.  I believe in its power not just to amuse and entertain, but to inspire and create aspiration in other. The goal early on was to get the music community/business to start focusing on this, which initially led to filming some artists. Then I realized we needed more than just music, we should explain the issue, which led to some undercover work. It just kept building on itself, and about a year into the project, I realized this was a film. It’s never been my goal to be a filmmaker, but a theater was the most obvious connecting point and place for people to experience something like this.

We put the film out in 31 theaters, and it became one of the top documentaries last year. And we did it all with volunteers. That’s an unbelievable feat, but the part of the story that I like is that we were all focused on one thing. We weren’t just focused on simply expressing ourselves or pursuing a career in film.  It was about needing to tell a story and needing this to become bigger than us or our efforts. And that’s what drove the making of the film and what drove the hundreds, no thousands, of people who got behind promoting the film – that was as much the story as the making of the film. Read more »