Collective Protagonists, with Brett Story, Stephen Maing, John Hanson, and Rob Nilsson
Two films in this year’s New York Film Festival lineup grapple beautifully with the challenge of narrating stories of collective movements without giving in to the allure of the heroic individual protagonist. John Hanson and Rob Nilsson’s Revivals selection Northern Lights (1978) stages the founding of the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota—formed in the mid-1910s by farmers from that state—parallel to a tale of young love, using a dramatized approach to explore the tensions between personal desires and collective commitments. Made more than four decades later, Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s documentary Union (2024)—featured in the festival’s Spotlight section—takes on another chapter in the history of the American labor struggle: the 2022 unionization drive of the Amazon plant on Staten Island, and the challenges facing an autonomous movement that requires leadership but is rooted in democracy. Last Saturday, the two directorial pairs—Hanson and Nilsson, and Story and Maing—joined Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute for a live panel discussion on their stylistically different but thematically connected works. In a thought-provoking conversation, they examined the practical, formal, and political considerations of making films about people power.