Peacetalks: Jill Freidberg teachers strike in Oaxaca

George Cadman of Free Radio Santa Cruz interviews award winning Seattle filmmaker Jill Freidberg about the teachers strike in Oaxaca and Freidberg's 2005 film "Granito De Arena". Freidberg has been going back and forth to Oaxaca all summer and just returned from there last week. Her film is the story of the popular resistance in Mexico to the global economic forces that have been dismantling public education for over 20 years. It is the story of hundreds of thousands of public schoolteachers whose grassroots, non-violent movement took Mexico by surprise, and who have endured brutal repression in their 25 year struggle for social and economic justice in Mexico's public schools. Jill Freidberg spent two years in southern Mexico documenting the efforts of over 100,000 teachers, parents, and students fighting to defend the country's public education system from the devastating impacts of economic globalization. Freidberg combines footage of strikes and direct actions with 25 years worth of archival images to deliver a compelling and unsettling story of resistance, repression, commitment, and solidarity.

Jill Freidberg produced the award-winning documentary This is What Democracy Looks Like (2000),which won numerous festival awards,screened in over 50 countries,and received national,prime-time television broadcasts in Canada and Mexico.

Freidberg was a founding member of the Seattle Independent Media Center and works with several independent media collectives and indigenous community radio stations in Mexico,and with community radio station KBCS, in Seattle,WA. She founded Corrugated Films in 2002, which works to build solidarity and understanding between communities of action through the grassroots production and distribution of video, radio, and other forms of independent media.

relevant website: http://www.corrugate.org