CRaB postgraduate researcher Carlus Hudson has written the following reflections on the screening of Blueberry Soup which was hosted by CRaB earlier this year.
Blueberry Soup: How Iceland changed the way we think about the world
On 10th January, CRaB was joined by documentary-maker Eileen Jerrett for a screening of her film Blueberry Soup. Blueberry Soup follows the stories of Icelandic people who have taken their country’s future into their own hands and sought to rewrite the constitution. Iceland was hit hard by the 2008 financial crisis: its economy shrunk by 10% and unemployment tripled. The largest protests in Iceland’s history took place in Reykjavik at the start of 2009, demanding that the right-wing government led by the Independence Party resign. They lost the 2009 election and a constitutional assembly was formed. People in Iceland took part in the drafting of a new constitution, using social media and other practices based in direct democracy. A new constitution was approved in a non-binding referendum but has not been implemented.
More recently, social media has been repeatedly associated with ‘fake news’, post-truth politics and sensationalist clickbait – especially in the context of the UK’s EU referendum and 2016 US presidential election. There has been considerable backlash from more traditional and established media. Alongside this there has been a growing fear of direct democratic participation. Unease with, if not outright fear, of social media and direct democracy now stands in sharp contrast with the optimism of less than a decade ago to both when it came to the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and 15-M movements of the early 2010s. Blueberry Soup is a potent reminder of what direct democracy and social media make possible. It has no time for nostalgia for a supposedly simpler and harmonious time before right-wing populism and Cold War-esque fears of Russian troll-bots. The documentary depicts people addressing the political and underlying economic causes of right-wing populism and an alternative to it.
After the screening, there was a discussion of it that touched on the situation in Iceland, the background to the making of the film and local democracy in Portsmouth.