Barbara Trent

Abstract

Marie Cieri: I know you didn’t start out as a documentary filmmaker but as a grassroots community activist. Why did you decide to become a filmmaker?

Barbara Trent’s experience as an activist spans 35 years and ranges from grassroots organizing in the Midwest related to the Vietnam War, poverty, and racism to the creation of highly controversial political documentaries that have been broadcast and screened in theaters throughout this country and abroad. In 1993, she and her filmmaking team won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for The Panama Deception, an independently produced indictment of the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama. Other award-winning feature-length documentaries she has directed and produced include COVERUP: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair and Destination Nicaragua, both of which are highly critical of recent U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.

Currently based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Trent co-directs the Empowerment Project, a nonprofit organization that provides assistance to independent filmmakers and videographers from the Southeast region and beyond. She firmly believes that independents must take it upon themselves to counter the corporately motivated messages of mainstream media with alternative views that are aggressively researched, produced, and distributed to the public. “I think you are capable of intervening in history if you’re able to move fast—you can save lives,” she says. Knowing firsthand the personal, political, and professional challenges her objective poses, Trent is actively involved in lecturing and conducting workshops around the country on public and foreign policy, civic responsibility, censorship, and independent film production and distribution. In the pages that follow, she tells how she first became an activist, how she moved from grassroots organizing to international projects, and what she has learned about activism and the possibility of social change in the process.