Twenty years after one of the world’s worst industrial accidents occurred in Bhopal, India, killing almost 5,000 people immediately and leaving more than 100,000 chronically ill, a spokesperson for the Dow Chemical Company appeared live on BBC. In an announcement that stunned the stock market in 2004, Jude Finisterra said that the chemical giant would take responsibility for the disaster and offer $12 billion in compensation for the victims.

The only problem was that Finisterra didn’t represent Dow. He didn’t even exist.

Finisterra was the creation of Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, whose corporate pranks make up the hilarious film The Yes Men Fix the World, which will have its Vancouver premiere at the opening gala of the 2009 Amnesty International Film Festival tonight (November 12).

Impersonating executives from such companies as Exxon Mobil Corporation and Halliburton, Bichlbaum and Bonanno make outlandish presentations at business conferences, laying bare the gross disregard for humanity in capitalism’s unbridled pursuit of profit.

For obvious reasons, Bichlbaum, who played Finisterra, doesn’t advertise what he and Bonanno will do next, and where.

“There’s just many. I mean, you know, where do you want me to start?” Bichlbaum asked the Georgia Straight on the line from New York City’s Parsons The New School for Design, where he works as an assistant professor in real life as Jacques Servin.

“There’s just a lot of ways that things can be run better,” Bichlbaum said about what he and Bonanno—who is actually Igor Vamos, an assistant professor at Troy, New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute—hope to accomplish. “What we’re trying to do is raise awareness of issues. But then it’s, of course, up to all of us to actually make those changes.”

This imperative for collective action to institute change is crystallized in an inspiring film that will also be screened as part of the 14th annual Amnesty International Film Festival, which runs until Sunday (November 15). The story portrayed in Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai traces the journey of the woman who founded Kenya’s green-belt movement.

As a young University of Nairobi lecturer in the mid-1970s, Maathai heard rural women complain that they didn’t have enough firewood. As a result, mothers weren’t serving traditional, nutritious meals that required long periods of cooking. Instead, they relied on processed ingredients that lacked nutrients. Consequently, their children suffered from malnutrition. Her solution: plant trees for fuel and food.

As the women learned how to plant trees, they also sowed the seeds of empowerment. They discovered the link between deforestation and the inequitable political and economic systems in their country, which condemned many Kenyans to poverty. What followed was their active involvement in the campaign to reform the African nation, taking up issues like the release of political prisoners. A repressive government was defeated in elections held in 2002.

Two years later, Maathai received the Nobel Peace Prize for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy, and peace.

On the line from Vermont, coproducer and codirector Lisa Merton said that communities wanting to improve their lives can learn a lesson from the experience of Maathai and the courageous women of her movement.

“Movements for social change really begin with the people who need to see the change,” Merton told the Straight. “That’s why she’s very effective there. They were suffering and she saw their need, and so they had this impetus from their own experience to change their lives. They just needed a catalyst, and she was that catalyst, I think. She became a leader, but it wouldn’t have happened without them.”

Two other films at the festival provide riveting images of people crying out for change.

In Un poquito de tanta verdad (A Little Bit of So Much Truth), the citizens of Oaxaca, an impoverished southern state in Mexico, stand up against the raw power of the government, which unleashes death squads and riot police.

In the gritty documentary chronicling the tumultuous events that started with a nonviolent teachers’ strike in May 2006, Seattle-based filmmaker Jill Irene Freidberg records how Oaxacans told their own story by peacefully taking over radio and television stations.

“The Oaxacan people demonstrated several things. One, they provided a contrast to the way the mainstream commercial and state media in Mexico and in Oaxaca were representing the struggles,” Freidberg said by phone. “And then they also demonstrated that media in the hands of the people is a very powerful tool when it comes to organizing and mobilizing a social movement.”

In Burma VJ, viewers will get a rare glimpse of dissent against the military junta that has ruled the Asian country and isolated it from most of the world for decades. Intrepid undercover Burmese video journalists, at tremendous risk to their lives, covered the turbulent days in the latter half of 2007, when Buddhist monks took to the streets of Rangoon to rally the people. The protests were violently quelled by the junta.

Certainly, there’s a lot more work needed to make lives better in Burma and other countries, but it’s never too late to start.