Back in 2017, Finnish director Mervi Enqvist made the documentary War/Peace which set out to re-introduce to contemporary audiences some of the key US student activists from the 1960s, characters such as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
The original idea of Enqvist’s Power of the People, which screens at Finnish Film Affair 2022, was to revisit Chicago, considered by many to be the home of radicalism, and assess the new generation of activists, one that is invested with a greater sense of hope and optimism, as opposed to the violence and strife that characterised much of the popular protests a half century before.
Four years ago, Enqvist met Heather Booth in Washington DC where she was working with the campaign for the national Democratic Party. Booth’s own activism began in the early 60’s with Freedom Summer, and later she created the Midwest Academy in Chicago, a school for activists. “After meeting with her it came clear to me that she had the answers I was looking for. She could tell me and – through our film – the audience what are the steps for an effective activism,” the director explains.
But another thought occurred to Enqvist. As a Finn, she had been able to enjoy Nordic tolerance and goodwill throughout her whole life, and there never seemed to be any specific need for the kind of activism that was practised in the States. Yes?
Actually, no. Enqvist wanted to see how activism was practised by those whose lives were not quite so comfortably Nordic. So she put out a call for a protagonist, somebody to articulate their dissatisfaction with the world, both local and wider afield. At which point she was introduced to the powerhouse Laura Eklund Nhaga, then 21, who, on her tumblr account, describes herself as “a biracial, half-African girl, who lives with her white mother.” The young woman Enqvist met was, in equal part, poet, blogger, activist and actor, and an articulate activist who was determined to debate, cajole and agitate.
“I met her and she invited me to her childhood neighborhood and we took a stroll, and I was mesmerized at how intellectual she was already back then, how strong she was, and she already had a very powerful voice, although she wasn’t really sure which direction to take it,” says Enqvist, underlining how Laura seemed “very rare for a Finn.”
And so Enqvist flew Laura to the States so she could meet and experience at first hand the new activists within Chicago, such as Senator Celina Villanueva who talks about the daily micro-aggressions she suffers, such as the compliments she receives on the ‘quality’ of her English. “You always remember the moment when [you realise] you’re not white,” she tells Laura. We also meet the extraordinary Camiela Williams, an anti-violence organiser for GoodKidsMadCity, who has seen more than 40 close friends and family murdered on the streets of Chicago. And Enqvist meets Heather Booth, the prime advocate for change through organization. “We have changed the world in the past, and we can change the world in the future,” she tells Laura.
Laura is even contracted to provide the Finnish translation of the poems by the brilliant young US poet Amanda Gorman, whose reading at the recent inauguration of President Biden included the memorable line: “the norms and notions of what ‘just’ is, isn’t always justice.”
Throughout the film, Laura talks brilliantly and uncompromisingly about race and about her place in the world as an activist. “Everything is activism,” she says. “Even when the world is determined to not let us win, there is a power within…When it comes to a point when we can’t take it anymore, we won’t.”
Enqvist talks about how getting to knowing Laura has effected a major shift in her own perception of race. “I had always thought that race doesn’t matter, that we are all equal [in Finland] and we all have the same rights and that people are treated the same way here,” she says. “But I have been colour blind. I may have thought everybody is equal, but I didn’t step outside my own whiteness…I’m a total outsider in that experience. My eyes were opened to see that we see our reality differently.”
It was a radical change of view for which Enqvist is grateful to her protagonist Laura. “Sometimes we think that activism is only marching and rallying but there are so many ways to be active. The real power is in people who work together, but it often starts from that one person sharing her story.”
