The Spark Change Social Impact Entertainment Summit is a yearly conference hosted by Creative Visions, UCLA’s Skoll Center for Social Impact Entertainment, and UCLA School of Law’s Promise Institute for Human Rights
Prodigium’s Marketing Director, Elyza Halpern, attended the 2022 conference this past Thursday at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She not only had the pleasure of meeting many of our peers in the social impact entertainment and cause marketing spaces, but also recorded some highlights from the panels (which covered a diverse set of SIE topics, ranging from climate change, to gender and racial justice, to using comedy as a mechanism for social change).
Here are 10 of the many standout quotes from the Spark Change Summit’s 2022 panels:
“You have to greenlight yourself at a certain point, whether other people or a whole world is telling you no, or you're in an obstacle moment, if you yourself have decided, it's getting done, it will get done. [...] I think it's really helpful for all of us to remember, we can have agency, and no matter how limited our resources are, or where we are in the process.”
-Sarba Das, Head of Nonfiction at Media Res Studio
“I do think we've seen a lot of change in the documentary world in the last 10, 20 years, where there are a lot more outlets, there's a much greater demand for documentaries [...] so it's important that you do the work and jump in because we need you, and the world needs you”
-Rory Kennedy, Documentary Producer and Director known for The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari and Downfall: The Case Against Boeing
“Portraying climate in your stories doesn't mean blatant moralizing or lecturing, I would actually advise you don’t do that, […] it's a generative creative lens through which we can view any subject under the sun. It can raise the stakes, deepen and complicate characters, and reveal unexpected twists and turns”
-Anna Jane Joyner, Founder of Good Energy
“I spoke to a lot of experts about pandemic disease and virology before Steven Soderbergh and I made Contagion, and we were told the same thing everywhere we went: it wasn't a question of if this would happen, it would, was a question of when.”
-Scott Z. Burns, writer of sci-fi thriller Contagion (2011)
“I think so often making documentaries is the art of being in the right place at the right time and situating yourself in an extraordinary moment, and just getting lucky and happening to be there. I think this film really embodies that: we were working on a completely different film project when we sort of stumbled upon this one.”
-Daniel Roher, Director of the investigative documentary Navalny (2022)
“We interviewed Q Anon people on my show, and when people are feeling lost, when people feel like they don't have hope, that's when they go searching for things like Q Anon, for Q. [...] Using comedy, we're able to get people to take a step back and feel the relief that they need. It’s like if they're laughing, they're not looking for Q.”
-Maya May, Comedian and Host of The Lincoln Project’s “We’re Speaking” and “The Game We’re In”
“Artists can work on a piece for an entire lifetime and never feel like it's ready for the public to lay their eyes on it, and some pieces you create may live on forever, and some might need several revisions, and that's okay. Allow what could easily be an identity crisis to become a voyage.”
-Estella Owoimaha-Church, Executive Director at Empowering Pacific Islander Communities
“I don't have an agenda, but I do have things that keep me up at night [...] I have to start digging and excavating the humanity of the people that keep me up at night, to bring some collective concern, compassion, to talking about how we're going to move as a society together.”
-Dominique Morisseau, Playwright, Actress and 2018 MacArthur Fellowship recipient
“One of the things we've discussed [on The Handmaid’s Tale] is that June, our main character, suffers [...] are things that women since time immemorial have suffered, but there's a way that the show kind of makes it more relatable because they're happening to a white, blond, blue eyed, American woman. In our show, the Americans are the ones who are the refugees.”
-Yahlin Chang, Executive Producer/Writer for Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale
“If you disagree with me, that might be upsetting, but I still want to know what you're doing. Talking about the [anti-choice] fringe: networks weren't giving any of these people airtime because they think that that's platforming them, but at the same time, it's actually such a doing such a disservice to the people who agree with us on this issue, because we they got away with what they did under the cover of darkness.”
-Nicole Shipley, Executive Producer of “Battleground: The Fight for the Future of Abortion In America,” Co-founder and President of Safe Space Pictures
Learn More about Social Impact Entertainment
We hope that reading these quotes from this year’s incredible panelists have inspired you to learn more about SIE. Check our free Cause Marketing and Storytelling guide and our impact campaign for our HBO Max docuseries “Gaming Wall street” for more informations about how you can integrate social impact into your next project.
If you’re working on a social impact entertainment project and think Prodigium could be a good partner, please feel free to contact us here.
