I spoke with Director of highly-anticipated We Are Many, Amir Amirani, about the role of the artist, political mistrust and the power of collective action.

15 February 2003 marked the largest protest in human history. Over 30 million people in 800 cities took to the streets to protest the impending invasion of Iraq. Amir Amirani’s powerful anti-war documentary chronicles the mass demonstrations that took place around the globe that day and how they would prove catalytic in nurturing a new superpower of global public opinion.

Describing his experiences of the event, Amirani reminisces: “I was at the Berlin Film Festival and I knew this protest was going to happen so I stayed in Berlin. When I got back to London they told me how huge it was. My friends told me it was massive, and it was indeed, over two million . In Berlin it had been half a million and so I felt I had missed something really big. That got me to thinking: why was it that I had felt upset and that I had wanted to be a part of it? It seemed to me after some research that it was a sort of historical, pivotal moment, because it was the biggest demonstration in history and as a filmmaker I thought that actually this was a perfect story for a film. Even though it hadn’t stopped the war, it seemed to be a story worth telling.”

Unbeknownst to Amirani at the time, the global demonstration would provide a platform for further acts of civil protest in the years that followed. The documentary film has developed over the process of its creation to trace that positive political progress.

“As the years went by (it took me nine years to make it) the story sort of developed and I realised that actually it had ramifications which we didn’t know and couldn’t have known at the time. We could only know after a span of time, which in the film we illustrate with the connections with the Arab Spring and the impact of the march on public opinion, and how that shaped public opinion ever since. You saw the fruits of that in the fact that Parliament refused to vote for war against Syria. It was an interesting day which many regard, or regarded at the time, as a failure, but now we can see in a new light.”

Opposition to the Iraq war garnered support from unprecedented numbers and from all corners of society. This was marked by the new masses of people who made their vehement disapproval seen and heard. For many, like Amirani, it was the first political incident that they were passionately roused by.

“Looking back, it was my first political act in a way. What was interesting though is that that was true of the majority of people who came out that day; not just in the UK but around the world. Two million in London; you can’t call those the usual suspects. The demonstration cut across all demographics. I was one of those new people who had come out on the streets because nobody really believed the reason being given for why this war should happen and yet it went ahead”.

On why it was so important to document this incident, Amirani offered that: “My first motivation was that it seemed to me like a great story for a documentary. So I started out wanting to tell the story but then I ended up needing to tell it.”

“It seemed to me so important, because it had to be recorded for posterity, and also because it would have set a dangerous precedent if people took away from the demonstration the message that ‘oh well, we will never do it again, it’s pointless because they never listen to us anyway’. A lot of people do still sadly feel like that because the way the government treated those protests with disdain meant that it had a very toxic, corrosive effect on our political system. People don’t believe in politics and politicians anymore; they’re very cynical about politics and who could blame them?”

The film’s release date, despite not being the initial intention, has proved quite convenient.

“It’s just a few weeks since the election. In Scotland it was a rout with the SNP and they were anti-war. Alex Salmond, who we interviewed, was against the war. In fact, he even tried to impeach or have Tony Blair arrested. The SNP are against Trident and in Britain there are all these planned protests against austerity, so in a way it really feels like the right time. In the last few days alone Ramadi was taken over by ISIS which of course many people see as the fruits of that terrible invasion, and if that wasn’t enough you also have the fact that on American Television the former deputy director of the CIA admitted that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their team misrepresented what the CIA was telling them and essentially lied. This is all coming out now, so it feels like the right time to be doing the film. What impact it will have is anyone’s guess.

Given the outcome of the 2003 protests, Amirani reflects on the power of collective action and whether or not demonstrations are effective:

“Over a span of time demonstrations do work and I think unless we want to resort to violence, which I don’t think anybody advocates, then what else do people have? There is a lot of work to be done to repair the breakdown in trust between people and politicians. People might conclude that it is beyond repair; a lot of people think we need a root and branch change of the political system.”

On what the audience has to learn from the film Amirani suggests that: “I hope one of the lessons people take away is that every person can make a difference and that it is not a waste of time to engage in civic action or to be an engaged citizen in politics. I think if that’s the message people take away then that is a good one.”