Take One Action gives power back to the people

"The news is overwhelming for people," he admits, "and you need these personal stories, and the time to dwell on them for 90 minutes in a cinema, in order to get up-close and see the human side of it. We show great films with great stories that reach out to audiences beyond the usual suspects who are engaged politically. But the difference between feeling like you’re having your voice heard and actually making yourself heard is quite a big gap. Particularly as online petitioning has taken off, people have quickly felt ‘Is that enough?' We have to be more canny, more creative and more clever. For every attempt to curtail free political protest, the people on the ground who care about issues of poverty or climate change or the many things we’re covering in the festival – tax avoidance, land rights, corporate power – those people and those movements are getting smarter. And they’re getting more fun to be part of, more inclusive than they were 10 or 20 years ago."

Watching the films at the festival is only the starting point, Bateson believes.

"You need someone to give you a positive inroad into what you can actually do about these issues, to let you know who’s already out there in Scotland doing stuff, and how you can support them and get involved. We put the festival on for people to come and take part in discussions, but we really want them to take the films that we show back into their own communities, whether that’s a geographic community or work community or educational community or faith groups, trade unions, whatever. We have a Take One Action Locals Programme which makes film licensing easy but also gives people the confidence and the skills and the network to be part of a family of groups and individuals showing these films across Scotland throughout the year. We really hope that people who come to the festival – and even those who can’t make it – will find out about that and start to think if there’s something they can do to seed some more inspiration around social change or social justice or a fairer planet into the community that they live in."

So what about specific films and themes in this year's festival programme? Bateson mentions a strand of films that feature ordinary people confronting enormous forces of vested interests, be it corporate or political power, or exploitation of an economic or environmental nature. He draws attention to The Divide, based on the book The Spirit Level, which highlights the negative impacts of inequality in the Western world; The Shore Break, which focuses on two cousins from a rural community opposing government plans to develop their homeland in South Africa; and Democrats, in which two men drafting a new constitution for Zimbabwe stand up to Robert Mugabe. The director of each of these films will be in attendance as will some local campaigners to give the issues a closer-to-home perspective. Included among them is the Sunday Herald's restaurant critic Joanna Blythman, who will take part in discussions following screenings of the film Food Chains.

"Food Chains is a fabulous film we’re premiering in the UK, produced by Eric Schlosser, who wrote Fast Food Nation, and the actress Eva Longoria," explains Bateson. "Again it’s about inequality and speaking truth to power. It’s set in the US but has global significance. It’s about the campaign led by Mexican migrant farm labourers, and tomato pickers specifically, to get paid a fair wage for what they pick and to challenge the constant undercutting by supermarkets which very rarely goes back to the consumer but goes to create completely unmerited profits for shareholders of those supermarkets.

"In the UK we’ve got reasonably good control of the rights of the agricultural workforce but we’ve still got a lot of migrant labourers here. And we also have huge imports from Europe of vegetables and other products. In Scotland we are relying on exploited migrant and cultural labour across Europe to produce the food that we eat every day.

"Joanna, who has written fantastic books about precisely this subject – our broken food system in the UK and globally – will be bringing people up to speed in the cinema about where Scotland and the UK are doing well about some of these things and where the challenges remain. Too often the stories that are utterly close to our day-to-day lives – who is growing our food, who is keeping us profitable as a country, who is benefitting from the exploitation that goes on in our country – are routinely obscured by aspects of our society and the media."

Flicking through the film trailers on Take One Action's YouTube channel was enough in itself to make me catch my breath. One film in particular, Landfill Harmonic, was emotionally overpowering even as a two-minute promo. It tells the story of a group of children in Paraguay who have built musical instruments from the trash found on the mountainous landfill site that dominates their slum dwellings. By creating the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura, they perfectly exemplify the creativity, perseverance and determination – the sheer indomitable human spirit – that burns right through this year's festival programme.

"These are kids that we in the world write off statistically in our brains every day," argues Bateson, "telling ourselves it’s just another story of poverty and hardship, that there are millions of people living like this. And suddenly you’re challenged by 20 young people who are born into poverty but go out looking to change their lives – who take trash from this huge landfill and create the most beautiful violins and cellos out of tin cans, and get together to make beautiful music and make a huge impression on the world. It's an incredible example of young people changing their lives, which can be replicated over and over again across the world where young people are inspired and given a chance and given dignity. There’s so little that is stopping us from achieving that as a society.

"We have to aim big, so that this story of the transformation of the lives of these young people in Paraguay isn’t the minority story. There are really simple things we can do if we just set a proper example and make some tough decisions – not practically difficult decisions, just politically difficult decisions – to reduce our carbon emissions so that countries like Paraguay aren’t swamped by flooding and have crop harvests and schools destroyed. That would be a start. We’re making progress but we need more people coming along to the festival and getting involved one way or another to keep vested interests on their toes and keep changing the story so that the lives of the young people we see in Landfill Harmonic become the norm and not the exception – so that their potential is realised."

There's every chance that Scotland in 2015 might be more receptive than ever to a festival like Take One Action because of the grassroots politicisation that came about last year as part of the Independence referendum.

"I hope so," Bateson agrees. "It’ll be really interesting to see. Our last festival opened on the day of the referendum results, so we had very different audiences in Edinburgh and Glasgow. In Edinburgh we had an audience of largely progressive political thinkers, who were like ‘OK, what do we do next? Where do we go from here?’ But in Glasgow there as was a greater sense of despondency. So this year is the chance for us to see how this plays into what we’re doing. There's definitely a big upsurge in the desire to be engaged, the desire to take back politics from the hands in which it has been wrested since the 1980s and the end of the miners’ strike, to take it back into popular control."

Take One Action Film Festival runs from September 16-27 across Glasgow and Edinburgh. For full programme details, as well as other information and resources, go to www.takeoneaction.org.uk