A Force More Powerful is a 1999 feature-length documentary film and a 2000 PBS series written and directed by Steve York about non-violent resistance movements around the world. Executive producers were Dalton Delan and Jack DuVall. Peter Ackerman was the series editor and principal content advisor.
Institutional support for the film included funding from the United States Institute of Peace and the Albert Einstein Institution.
The film played in festivals worldwide and was broadcast nationally on United States television network PBS in September 2000. It was nominated for a Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program.
The series explores 6 successful nonviolent movements in the 20th century starting with Gandhi's leadership of the Indian Independence movement, the U.S. civil rights movement, the boycotts in the Eastern Cape Province as part of the Anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa, the Danish resistance to Nazi Occupation, the Polish Solidarity Movement, and the Chilean democracy movement to oust Augusto Pinochet.
A Force More Powerful is also the name of the companion book to the PBS series, authored by DuVall and Peter Ackerman,. The book was published with Palgrave Macmillan and has been recognized as an important resource for peace education.
In 2006, the team behind the film, TV series and book released a nonviolent video game developed by Breakaway Games with the same title. The video game was designed to teach the waging of conflict using nonviolent methods. Ivan Marović, one of the leaders of the Serbian student movement called Otpor!, was one of the designers. A turn-based strategy game, it consists of ten pre-built scenarios and an editing system that will allow players to create scenarios of their own.
Famous quotes containing the words force and/or powerful:
“We should have an army so organized and so officered as to be capable in time of emergency, in cooperation with the National Militia, and under the provision of a proper national volunteer law, rapidly to expand into a force sufficient to resist all probable invasion from abroad and to furnish a respectable expeditionary force if necessary in the maintenance of our traditional American policy which bears the name of President Monroe.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“Powerful men in particular suffer from the delusion that human beings have no memories. I would go so far as to say that the distinguishing trait of powerful men is the psychotic certainty that people forget acts of infamy as easily as their parents’ birthdays.”
—Stephen Vizinczey (b. 1933)