‘99%’ Poster Debuts on TakePart

Occupy Filmmaking: How Is a Movie Like a Protest Movement?

Your first look at the poster for ‘99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film.’
August 6, 2013
Willy Blackmore

Making a movie about Occupy Wall Street is a bit like being in Zuccotti Park.

On October 1st, 2011, Audrey Ewell was watching a livestream video of Occupy Wall Street protesters from her Brooklyn apartment. That day, a group marched from Zuccotti Park to the Brooklyn Bridge, where they were kettled by police officers and arrested en masse—a full 700 protesters were taken into police custody.

In the midst of the drama, which was playing out not far away, in the middle of a work day, the livestream feed went down. “So I turned on the TV and I figured this must be on the news—there were like 700 people being arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge in the middle of the day,” Ewell told me in a phone interview. “It seemed like news to me. So I turn on the TV and there was nothing—there was no coverage of it.”

That was the first day she and her filmmaking partner Aaron Aites lugged their cameras down to Zuccotti Park, shooting the initial footage for what would become 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film, a documentary about the protests that opens in New York and Los Angeles on September 6 and will air on Pivot on September 17.