In September 2011, Andrew Halliwell started to pay close attention to what was going on in New York City.
A social movement was taking shape in Zuccotti Park, a stone’s throw away from the impenetrable towers housing some of the most powerful banking entities in the world.
That movement would soon be known around the world as Occupy Wall Street, and Halliwell, together with his friend Corey Ogilvie, began to track its emergence, progression, and representation in the mainstream media.
“Corey and I both had an affinity with what was going on, and the traditional media wasn’t doing a good job of reporting on it,” says the Vancouver producer and musician over coffee more than three years after the birth of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Ogilvie began releasing five- to seven-minute web videos, intercutting animation segments and raw footage from boots on the ground with mainstream media coverage. One of the videos garnered more than one million views in less than a month.
Soon Ogilvie and Halliwell realized they’d out-stepped the scope of web videos and were now in feature film territory – and that it was time to head south and experience the movement for themselves.
Halliwell travelled down to New York that November, and was present for the teardown of Zuccotti Park, and the Brooklyn Bridge march; the following spring, Ogilvie and Halliwell returned to the States and began conducting interviews in earnest.
The end result of their diligence is Occupy: The Movie.
Directed by Ogilvie and produced by Halliwell, the film lays out the history of the corporatocracy: The tangled nest of government and corporate interests whose self-serving and destructive actions in the wake of the global economic slowdown so enraged the Occupiers.
The documentary takes audiences deep into the Occupy Wall Street movement, via news bites, original footage, and interviews with notable thinkers like Kalle Lasn, Noam Chomsky, and Cornell West, and key players within the movement itself.
Occupy: The Movie scooped up numerous accolades on the festival circuit, enjoying sold-out screenings at DOXA and Hot Docs and winning the award for Best Documentary World Cinema at the 2013 Phoenix Film Festival.
Now, this little-documentary-that-could about a people-driven resistance movement is bypassing traditional distribution streams and offering itself up directly to the people.
Self-distribution wasn’t the producers’ first choice. Occupy was on track to be distributed through more traditional avenues when the owner of their UK-based distributor died.
“He had a meeting with Netflix on our behalf, and I don’t know what happened with it, because he went into hospital and he passed away,” says Halliwell. “That’s what life hands you sometimes. The universe owes you nothing, and you have to roll with it.”
And so, the film is now available for rental and purchase via its website. “I like new media,” says Halliwell. “One thing that film producing taught me is that the traditional system is broken and I don’t want to work in it at all.”
Like Occupy, Halliwell too seems to have eschewed a traditional path.
Halliwell grew up in small-town Ontario and moved to Vancouver Island when he was 15. An alumnus of the Canadian College of Performing Arts (where his roommate was Carly Rae Jepsen), Halliwell has tried his hand at numerous skill sets over the years: musician; actor; composer; computer programmer; producer; web developer; one-time student of astronomy and astrophysics (“I did a year of physics and astronomy, and figured that if I was going to be poor and heady, I would rather be poor and heady as a musician than as a scientist”).
Since Occupy: The Movie, Halliwell has composed music for multiple film projects, including Crystal Lowe’s Becoming Sophie, Agam Darshi’s Fade Out, Orsy Szabo and Krista Rand’s Lead and Follow, and Nash: The Movie, about homegrown basketball legend Steve Nash.
He also found the time to produce Ben Ratner’s award-winning Down River, which began airing on Movie Central earlier this month.
“I think I initially got into producing because I liked the challenge of it,” says Halliwell. “I like strategic thinking and I like planning, and that’s what producing offered to me.”
Halliwell walked the red carpet at the 2014 Leo Awards as a double nominee for two very different skill sets: Best Musical Score for Fade Out, and as part of the Down River production team’s nomination for Best Picture (the latter of which took the top prize).
For now, at least, Halliwell is focusing on musical composition and performance via his solo music project, Theves, and heralding the online release of Occupy: The Movie.
• Occupy: The Movie is available to rent and purchase at OccupyTheMovie.com
