The Take: occupy, resist, produce

Catholic New Times, Jan 16, 2005 by Rosemary Ganley

Naomi Klein, the young, smart Canadian journalist-activist has demonstrated with this riveting new documentary that she is the true daughter of the films-for-resistance heroine Bonnie Klein.

In the 1980s, Bonnie Klein, working with the National Film Board, made If You Love This Planet, an Academy Award-winning film, Speaking our Peace and Not a Love Story.

Now, Naomi Klein completes an important project with her multi-talented spouse Avi Lewis, himself scion of a formidable Canadian family of progressive thinkers (son of Michele Landsberg and Stephen Lewis), and former host of CBC TV's Counterspin.

Klein and Lewis, only in their early thirties, went to Buenos Aires for several months in 2003. They had become intrigued by a powerful new movement there: laid-off workers were taking back and running closed factories; in textiles, auto parts, even in ice cream manufacture.

Klein and Lewis, with film crew Mark Allam and Ricardo Acosta, learned that 200 formerly shuttered factories had been reclaimed by workers, who were running them as co-operatives after hard struggles to comply with rulings from the Bankruptcy Court, a forum usually busy protecting owners. Thousands of jobs were being restored. It was the National Movement of Recovered Factories.

They also found a new politics at work. Starting on the shop floor, Argentines were beginning to understand and resist the IMF-dominated government of their country.

What the film does remarkably well is build suspense. The viewer, pulling for the workers, also follows the tense campaign for re-election of "business-friendly" president, Carlos Menem. We see Menem, returning from disgrace to run on a "law and order" agenda alter a disastrous earlier term. In speeches, Menem likes to compare himself to Jesus.

Lewis and Klein, who alternatively do the voice-over in the film, know that a cardinal rule of good storytelling is to involve the viewer in someone's personal life. In this case, it is the worker/organizer Freddy, who with his family, speaks at length with the filmmakers as they follow his uncertain, courageous quest to get his factory re-opened and run by the workers.

Some intimate moments captured on the film--tears, joy, anxiety, and playfulness--are astonishing.

The musical score for The Take by David Wall, is hauntingly Latin, full of pain and vitality. One ballad he includes, by Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa, is unforgettable.

Naomi Klein, author of the best-selling No Logo, was once asked by an adversary: "We know what you are against: what are your alternatives?"

With The Take, she and Lewis have provided a ringing answer. It is ninety minutes of learning, laced with hope.

If you can't catch it with its Christmas spirit right now, it will still be relevant at Easter.

www.nfb.ca/thetake