Joan Baez campaigns for AFSC
Joan Baez, the renowned folk singer and activist, is raising funds for American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) ahead of a new documentary about her life.
Titled Joan Baez: I Am a Noise, the documentary is directed by Karen O’Connor, Miri Navasky, and Maeve O’Boyle, who have been working on it since 2017.
As part of the promotion, fans are being invited to donate to AFSC for the chance to be flown to New York City to meet her at an exclusive screening of the documentary, released in October. ‘The best part,’ Joan Baez says, ‘is that every entry supports the American Friends Service Committee in its work to nonviolently bring peace and equality around the world. It’s an organization I have been affiliated with since I was 8 years old.’
Famed for her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, Joan Baez was brought up by Quakers and cited this upbringing in her presidential endorsement for Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee. Writing on her Facebook page in 2016, she said: ‘My choice, from an early age, has been to engage in social change from the ground up, using the power of organized nonviolence. A distrust of the political process was firmly in place by the time I was 15. As a daughter of Quakers I pledged my allegiance not to a flag or a nation state but to humankind, the two often having little to do with each other.’
Joan Baez also spent time in jail for her activities in the peace movement during the Vietnam war, including when she and her husband, David Harris, were sent to jail for his failure to report for the draft. She also spent time in prison for blocking the door to a draft induction centre in California.
The film has been praised for its candour and intimacy, revealing details of her family history, sibling rivalry and early relationship with Bob Dylan. One reviewer described it as ‘spiraling out from a pivotal time for Baez, her 2019 farewell tour, the film is languorous, subtly knitting together years, songs and scenes, loves, losses and recoveries’.
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