TRUTH TO POWER
Truth to Power: Barbara Lee Speaks for Me, a feature length documentary, tells the complex story of Representative Barbara Lee, a steadfast voice for human rights, peace and economic and racial justice in the US Congress who cut her teeth as a volunteer for the Black Panther Party and was the lone vote in opposition to the broad authorization of military force following the September 11th attacks. In 2001, she issued a strident warning in the House of Representatives: “Let us not become the evil we deplore,” and today she continues that clarion call, demanding that Congress stand up to a president who has escalated tensions with numerous foreign governments, while seeding division within his own country.
Truth to Power reveals how many of the challenges faced by Barbara Lee early in her life provided her with the motivation and commitment to improve the lives of others throughout her tenure as an elected representative. With unique access to a sitting member of Congress, this film not only introduces the public to Barbara Lee but to many others such as Senator Cory Booker, Rep. John Lewis, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, CNN commentator Van Jones, actor Danny Glover and author Alice Walker who all share insights about what makes Barbara Lee unique as a public servant and as a truth-telling African American woman.
For the past seventeen years, Lee has introduced an amendment each year to repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force and require a debate on war authorizations. In 2017, she gained traction with support from Republican members of Congress, and the documentary will follow Lee’s efforts to re-introduce the amendment in 2018 and 2019.
While she fights relentlessly for her ideals in the contentious, partisan politics of Washington, D.C., back home in Oakland, California, Lee provides leadership to a new generation of nonviolent community leaders. She co-founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Center and every year invites young people to join her, along with Rep. John Lewis and other members of Congress, on the annual Civil Rights pilgrimage from the site of MLK’s assassination to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. With American society veering toward increasingly brazen hate speech, ethnic division and racially charged rhetoric and violence, Lee’s grassroots education and organizing takes on new urgency. As we follow Lee’s path through the halls of Congress and the streets of Oakland and Selma, we will come to understand how the poverty, racism and domestic violence she witnessed in her early years formed her deep convictions, and how her introduction to politics through the campaigns of Bobby Seale and Shirley Chisholm continues to influence her as a leader.
“If John Kennedy were to write Profiles in Courage today, he would include Barbara Lee.”