A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict, a new two-part
documentary, premiered on PBS stations on Mondays, September 18 and 25.
     
The riveting three-hour documentary — narrated by Academy Award
winning actor Ben Kingsley — explores how, during a century of extreme violence,
millions around the world chose to battle the forces of oppression and
brutality with nonviolent weapons — and won.
     
A co-production for PBS by York Zimmerman Inc. and WETA of Washington,
DC, A Force More Powerful is written and produced by award-winning
filmmaker Steve York. Einstein Institution Board member Peter Ackerman is the series
editor and its principal content advisor. Jack DuVall is the executive
producer for the documentary, Miriam Zimmerman its managing producer,
Dalton Delan its executive in charge of production.
     
Acclaimed filmmaker Steve York bypasses the clichés that commonly
surround nonviolent movements and skillfully portrays the hard-edged
planning, strategy, and discipline that often determine success or failure.

The film also gives voice to several pioneering, though lesser known,
leaders of these powerful nonviolent campaigns.
     
The idea for the film emerged from several of the themes and case
studies that Einstein Institution Board member Peter Ackerman and former
Einstein Institution President Christopher Kruegler developed in their book
Strategic Nonviolent Conflict (1994).
     
The Einstein Institution is one of a number of underwriters for the
television series. In addition, the Institution contributed extensive
research materials and comments to the filmmakers during the film’s
researchphase. In 1997 the Institution received a grant from the U.S. Institute of
Peace to coordinate preliminary archival film research by the filmmakers.
     
The new PBS series is the centerpiece of a global media and
educational project intended to elevate understanding of how nonviolent action can
succeed in overturning dictators and securing democracy and human rights.
St. Martin’s Press has just published a companion book of the same name by
Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall.
     
A Force More Powerful uses stunning archival footage to present six
stories of successful movements around the world. Each includes interviews
with witnesses, survivors and unsung heroes who contributed to these
century-changing events. The stories include:

• The 1960 Nashville, Tennessee campaign to desegregate the city's downtown
business district, which profiles the Rev. James Lawson Jr., who studied
Gandhi’s techniques in India and later joined forces with Martin Luther
King Jr. His intensive workshops on nonviolent resistance drove the sit-ins and
boycotts and became what King called “the model of the movement.”

• Mohandas Gandhi’s famous Salt March of 1930, during which he enjoined
Indians to protest the British salt monopoly—a turning point that paved the
way for India’s independence from Britain. Gandhi steered a shrewdly
strategic, ever-escalating course of “noncooperation” with British rule.

• The consumer boycott campaigns against apartheid in the Eastern Cape
Province of South Africa in the mid 1980s, led by the young Mkhuseli
Jack—radicalized at the age of 18 by laws that kept him from enrolling in
school. These and other campaigns proved instrumental in defeating
apartheid and freeing Nelson Mandela.

• The courage and endurance of Denmark’s citizens during the Nazi
occupation of World War II. Their noncooperation undermined Nazi attempts to exploit
Denmark for food and war materiel. In addition to committing sabotage and
staging general strikes, the Danes’ underground resistance rescued all but
a few hundred of Denmark’s seven thousand Jews from the Holocaust.

•The 1980 Gdansk Shipyard strike that won Poles the right to organize free
trade unions launched the Solidarity movement and catapulted Lech Walesa, a shipyard electrician, on a path of leadership—and led to the fall of communism in Poland and the election of Walesa to the presidency of the country.

• The national protest days led by Chilean copper miners in 1983 showed
that public opposition to the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet was
possible. Brutally suppressed, opposition forces persisted and eventually removed
Pinochet’s military government in a 1988 referendum.