From The Minnesota Daily

BY Tony Libera
PUBLISHED: 04/16/2009

“Unconvention”

DIRECTED BY: Chris Strouth

RATED: Not Rated

SHOWING: St. Anthony Main, April 26, 5:15 pm

It has now been more than seven months since the 2008 Republican National Convention came to its resounding end. The events of those four intense days continue to play out, yet many have already forgotten what exactly transpired. In his first political documentary, “Unconvention,” local director Chris Strouth combats this widespread amnesia by exhibiting a broad collection of interviews and firsthand accounts of both the order of the convention and the mayhem on the streets. The result is an engaging, at times terrifying, record of the 2008 RNC.

What sets the film apart is the style in which it is presented. Strouth doesn’t attempt an all-encompassing narrative; he doesn’t even make a political statement. Instead, he simply tells the story through the filmed experiences of journalists from a variety of political and social backgrounds. These ranging perspectives help tell all sides of the story, and while no film is free of bias, “Unconvention” certainly takes a crack at complete objectivity.

A&E spoke with Strouth about the convention, protestors and the role of the journalists in today’s media.

What were the issues that you wanted to deal with in this film?

The movie is as much about the media as it is about the events of the moment: what really got caught, what didn’t get caught. It’s not a film about protest; it’s not a film trying to convince someone. Our way of thinking was that this whole process is kind of insane and there might be a better way to handle it. Our perspective was: we’re not pro-protester, we’re not anti-protestor, we’re not pro-cop, we’re not anti-cop; we just think the whole thing was idiotic.

And it was amazing to me that people who lived in St. Paul didn’t realize there was a firefight going on. The amount of tear gas, percussion grenades, all the stuff that went off and you don’t really get it. The footage from CNN of this girl being hit by bikes was one of the only images that got into mainstream media. I think it says a lot that it was just a moment, and there’s so much information out there that it’s a moment that got completely lost. Even though it was on CNN, you didn’t hear a lot about it.

The other thing that really got us was the arrest of the journalists. Journalists had such a strange role in this. We have footage from this guy who is the editor of Variety and he got arrested as a protester. This is like a Brooks Brothers kind of guy and they took his cameras and a lot of the footage he got, and that’s draconian; that’s just not right. But at the same time you’ve got a lot of people who were like, I have a blog and therefore I am the press and they made their own press passes. They’d go write about something and then they’d go protests and they’d use these press passes as a get out of jail free card. Our thing on that is if you’re a journalist, you’re a journalist. You might not be a journalist all the time, but when you’re doing that process you have to be in that mindset.

The film comes off as comparatively unbiased. Did you have any political agenda or were you attempting fly-on-the-wall neutrality?

We really tried to take the pure documentary approach. Tim Sherno [KSTP reporter] said a thing in the film that’s great, “I’m here to witness. I am the unblinking eye.” That’s totally it. We’re not there to persuade; we just wanted to shine a light and show the ludicrousness of the situation on both sides; the circus element. There were people throughout this that we thought were absolutely ludicrous. My favorite moments are when people from either side would at first say something that sounded rational, and then as they got further and further they become, you know, Mussolini.

But there’s always going to be a slight slant whether it’s intentional or not; you can’t avoid that. I know that the film is a little more sympathetic on the left than it is on the right, but it’s mostly — I don’t want to say a centrist approach — but just a common sense approach. When it comes to politics, people get very heated and they don’t necessarily see past their perspective.

What effect do you hope the film will have seven months after the events of the 2008 RNC?

Basically I just want people to bear witness. My thinking about things like an atrocity in general — and I’m going to go ahead and call this an atrocity — is that if you bear witness to it, it won’t happen again. News moves so fast these days that everything gets lost. The RNC was just like a bad cocktail; people wanted to swallow it down and try not to think about it anymore. But we’ve got to know our mistakes or we’re destined to repeat them over and over again.

We like to talk about politics at parties. We like to talk about politics in a way that’s pretty unobtrusive, but it’s a very strange notion that because someone watches the news they think they’re politically active or politically conscious. There’s a big difference between just being aware and doing something about it and it doesn’t take much to be involved and change the tide. If enough people, just ordinary people, actually said to their congressmen, “Hey, we don’t want to do this anymore, let’s not waste millions of dollars on conventions, lets figure out a better way to do this.”

So there is some criticism regarding the convention itself?

Well, it’s just a ludicrous process and now is an awesome time to rewrite the system, rebuild the infrastructure and find something that works, where everybody feels represented. There’s this infrastructure that we’ve never updated, so even though we’re living in this technological age of instant telecommunications and instant contact, we still organize in a way akin to Whig politics.

It’s just sort of silly and we’re not hearing people; everybody’s got their own agenda. One of the things that I would hope for with the film is that people be aware that we need to let go of our personal agendas just to see what agenda the world needs around us and kind of adjust to it. But I think really the film just bears witness. It’s a statement that says, “This happened. Let’s try not to [expletive] it up again.”

From Vita. MN

Chris Strouth of Minneapolis has constructed a solid, incisive record of the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul. This is his first nonmusic film, but it still has musicality. It’s a documentary that comes with a clever concept — billed as a mix tape. He pulls from more than a dozen sources, mostly from citizen journalists, all with the intent of constructing a balanced document. Even though it’s not as objective as purported (there’s no doubt whose side Strouth is on), the film contains some appalling footage of how ugly things got. And I loved the footage of Rage Against the Machine performing a cappella versions of “Bulls on Parade” and “Killing in the Name Of” while also asking for peaceful protest.

Erik McClanahan