Jacqueline Soohen
Biography
Jacqueline Soohen is an award winning documentary filmmaker with Big Noise Tactical Media . Her three feature films, Zapatista (1998), Black and Gold (1999) and This Is What Democracy Looks Like (2000), have won top honors at hundreds of film festivals from New York, Toronto and Los Angeles to Berlin, Seoul and Bogota. She has also produced short films, television and video reports from the front lines of struggles around the globe. In 1999, as one of the founding members of the Independent Media Center, she collaborated in cutting daily satellite feeds from the WTO protests in Seattle. In 2001, she joined the Zapatistas' march from the Lacandon Rainforest to Mexico City, shooting and editing in the back of a schoolbus a one hour television show that went to satellite across the continent as the Zapatistas marched into the capital. In 2002 she reported for Democracy Now! and FreeSpeech TV from Argentina, Afghanistan, South Africa, Iraq and Palestine, where she was the only videographer to break the Israeli seige on the Church of the Nativity. During the last year she has spent almost six months in Iraq, before and after the war, as a member of Voices in the Wilderness, and established an independent news site Iraqjournal.org, with journalist Jeremy Scahill where they posted independent audio, video, print, and photo reports from inside the country. Most recently she returned to Iraq to train and equip Iraqi youth with video cameras to document their experiences of the occupation and hopes to be able to continue this project, as well as supporting web activism inside Iraq. She has just completed and is getting to launch a new feature documentary entitled, "Fourth World War", shot over the last two years in grassroots struggles around the globe. The film weaves together stories from Argentina, Palestine, Mexico, South Africa, Korea, New York 9/11, the "North" from Quebec City to Genoa, and Iraq. It is a film made with a global network of independent media and activist groups; a film that would have been unimaginable at any other moment in history. Big Noise is also involved in discovering creative ways of distributing independent video, from a revival of 'video clubs', and live video sets, to video sharing over the internet. Big Noise is a part of the newly created v2v.cc, a video file sharing network, and will participate in the coming events around the WSIS in Geneva this December. Some films from Big Noise: Zapatista (1998) - Black and Gold (1999) - A New York street gang tries to follow in the steps of the Black Panthers and the Young Lords Breaking the Bank (2000) - Protests against the World Bank in Washington DC This Is What Democracy Looks Like (2000) - More than 100 cameras record the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, 1999 Storm From the Mountain (2001) - The Zapatista Caravan 9.11 (2001) - First reactions to the events of September 11th, produced with NYC Indymedia Meen Erhabe (2003) - A hip-hop video from Occupied Palestine Planet of the Arabs (2003) - Hollywood stereotypes of Arabs, from all your favorite movies Reverend Billy's Revival (2003) - Reverend Billy's Stop Shopping Revival Fourth World War (2003) - A war without end. A war that is everywhere. And the people who resist.