40 Days & 40 Nights
Feature length film In Production
Director
Dara Kell
Producer
Taira Akbar
Doc Society helped with
Went to Good Pitch
140 million people in the United States are poor or low-wealth. In the wealthiest society in human history, nearly half of the population lives in poverty or is struggling to make ends meet and cannot afford a $400 emergency.
“40 Days and 40 Nights,” tells the story of a bold new social movement to end poverty in the United States, led by Reverend William J. Barber. A pastor from a small town in North Carolina, Reverend Barber, has been praised as “the most important progressive political leader in generations.” After the success of the Moral Monday protests, Reverend Barber - inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign - joined other clergies to launch a national movement led by poor and working people.
40 Days and 40 Nights is an intimate account of a "season of resistance," told through the eyes of Reverend Barber as well as the mothers, veterans, preachers, and students who are the voices and founding members of this new “fusion” movement. For 40 days and 40 nights during the Summer of 2018, thousands of people - Black, white, Latino, First Nation, Asian, Jewish, Muslim and Christian, people not of faith, gay, straight, young and old - work together, picking up the baton from the freedom fighters of the Civil Rights Movement.
The film follows Reverend Barber as he travels across the country to recruit participants, encountering everyday citizens who show promise as inspiring, if unlikely leaders. He meets US army veterans who have suffered detrimental hardships - surviving in places like Aberdeen, WA that hold little promise but plenty of cheap heroin. He meets a mother in Selma, AL who lost her daughter to cancer because Alabama refused to expand Medicare, denying her daughter life-saving treatment. And he meets people who worked with Dr. King during the 1968 Poor People's Campaign, and who illuminate a forgotten history.
The film bears witness to the profound process by which those without power decide not to accept their powerlessness. Instead, they claim - through protest, dance, song, and poems, through testimony and tears - their birthright: to live decent lives in the United States of America. Our characters offer an intimate face-to-face with people creating a new world for all living on the frontlines of poverty to show how their fate intertwines with the future of all humanity.
Crew
Dara Kell
Director
Dara Kell is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Her films have been broadcast on PBS, TVFrance, and Netflix, and screened at festivals worldwide. Her first film "Dear Mandela," followed three courageous young South African slum dwellers who led a social movement to stop mass evictions across the country. The film won multiple awards including Grand Jury Prize at the Brooklyn Film Festival and Best South African Documentary at the Durban International Film Festival. "Dear Mandela" was the centerpiece of a 3-year, 4 -continent-wide audience engagement project that developed the leadership skills of housing activists in slums in India, Nigeria Brazil, Haiti, and many other countries. Dara has made short films in Brazil, Azerbaijan, Egypt, and China, and is currently making a documentary about Reverend William Barber and poverty in America. She has been awarded grants from the Sundance Institute, the Ford Foundation, NYSCA, the Corporation of Yaddo and many organizations.
Taira Akbar
Producer
Taira Akbar is an award-winning filmmaker and trained artist focusing on marginalized cultural groups and niche environmental issues. Started a career in documentary film at the BBC, developing a dedication for long-form documentary, going on to co-found an independent production company in 2007 based in London. Under the production company, turned a volatile political and environmental crisis into a feature-length documentary. The result of this decade long commitment to creativity and journalistic precision was the film When Two Worlds Collide-debuted in January 2016 at the Sundance Film Festival and landed the Special Jury Prize for Best Debut Feature. This preceded over 20 other international awards.
