Really good piece about our state! It took FOURTEEN YEARS, but citizens did finally prevail on the collective bargaining rights for public sector workers and the gerrymandering issues.

"Wisconsin may initially seem like an odd choice to focus on as a beacon of hope. After all, though President Biden carried the state in 2020, Trump flipped it back in 2024. But that isn’t the whole story. Democrats in Wisconsin have displayed a remarkable amount of grit and tenacity in their work to shore up the fragile tools of democracy and to undo the very worst of the Scott Walker era."

Public Notice

Searching for a ray of hope? Look at Wisconsin.

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a year ago · 298 likes · 6 comments · Lisa Needham

Almost 14 years later, Act 10, the controversial legislation that triggered the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising, the focus of our film, has been overturned with collective bargaining rights restored for public sector workers!

Act 10 ended the ability of most public-sector unions to negotiate over any issues other than raises, and those raises were capped at the rate of inflation. In addition, unions were required to hold annual elections to maintain their ability to negotiate for those raises. For those elections, they must win a majority of all eligible members, not just those who cast votes.

The measure cut public workers' paychecks and siphoned off most of the strength of their unions.

Public workers earning $50,000 a year saw their take-home pay shrink by about 8.5% because they had to pay more for their benefits, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau at the time.

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Read the whole story here:

Katherine M Acosta, director, producer, and writer for the project is a sociologist turned filmmaker. She earned her PhD in sociology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she earned two graduate teaching awards and worked as a lecturer. She later moved to Madison, Wisconsin where she worked on several grant-funded research projects. After the historic 2011 protests in Madison, she decided to combine her passion for documentary film with her sociological research skills to try her hand at film making. She learned through teaching that students were most readily engaged in sociological analysis through film. Storytelling, after all, is the way that humans have shared history and knowledge for millennia. Divided We Fall is her first film.

Interviews with Filmmaker

Richard Acklin, her partner in life and filmmaking, serves as co-producer and production sound engineer.

Gretta Wing Miller and the late Aarick Beher, The Downtown Dailies/blue studio team, bring decades of experience to post-production. Gretta has been a film & video editor and instructor since 1978, working mostly on documentary television series and specials (American Masters, National Geographic) and independent features. She has taught film editing at Hunter College (CUNY),Final Cut Pro tutorials, and Digital Filmmaking in the College for Kids program through the UW-Madison Education Outreach.

Aarick Beher was a life-long musician and music producer, who worked with many of the most creative artists and songwriters in Madison, Wisconsin.

The incomparable Ida Jo whose music scores the film. We first heard Ida perform at a fundraiser for the Second Harvest food bank and immediately agreed there was no one else we wanted for the film. She’s an amazing talent, with a unique plucking and bow technique and clear pure vocals.

Film Reviews

The people of Wisconsin!

Divided We Fall combines original in-depth interviews with dramatic citizen-produced video and photos to create a compelling narrative of the battle to save collective bargaining for public workers in Wisconsin and to resist an austerity agenda.

The film also features interviews with labor leaders, scholars and pundits such as the late Marty Beil (executive director, AFSCME Council 24), the late Frank Emspak (Workers Independent News), Professor Katherine Cramer (author, The Politics of Resentment) and Matthew Rothschild, long-time editor of the Progressive magazine.

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Institutional Distribution-New Day Films

Interview with Workers Independent News

October 10, 2016

Listen to Divided We Fall director Katherine Acosta and Teaching Assistant Association (TAA) activist Matt Kearney on Esty’s Dinur’s show “A Public Affair” on WORT.

Listen to the WORT interview here

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Institutional Distribution-New Day Films

5 Questions Interview with Lake Front Row

David Klein March 19, 2017

Every year David Klein of LakeFrontRow asks directors of films in the “Wisconsin’s Own” section of the Wisconsin Film Fest five questions about their work.

SAVAGE CINEMA: When We Fought & How We Lost

March 18, 2017

If you read only one review of Divided We Fall, please read Scott Collins over at Savage Cinema. It’s long – but well worth the time. Collins gets, in a profound way, what we were trying to do with our film.

"Divided We Fall," is a stunning, sobering documentary from Writer/Director Katherine M. Acosta, and proved itself to be a riveting, compulsively watchable experience. Yes, as previously stated, viewing the overall failures of this specific protest movement nearly brought me to tears but even so, I could easily tap back into those awesome emotions I felt from 2011 quite easily, as the passion and commitment of so many people truly felt as if it could move mountains.

Even while feeling discouraged, the importance of speaking truth to power, peacefully and by whatever means necessary, remains crucial to maintaining any sense of democracy. Acosta's film is extremely wise to this conceit but even wiser when it showcases the mistakes, the pitfalls, and the ways progressives and liberals can be apt to become lost in the weeds of their own making, as well as how agendas can clash even when working on the same ideological sides.

Wisconsin Film Festival: 'Divided We Fall' is a case study of the Act 10 protests

ROB THOMAS The Capital Times

Mar 14, 2017

Six years after the Act 10 protests roiled the Wisconsin Capitol, there have been several documentaries about the battle between Gov. Scott Walker and tens of thousands of protesters opposed to his plan to gut collective bargaining rights for most public employees.

“Citizen Koch” looked at the big corporate interests that backed Walker’s plan. “Wisconsin Rising” was a protester’s eye view of what it was like to be there in the Capitol.

But “Divided We Fall,” which screens at the 2017 Wisconsin Film Festival on April 2 at the Barrymore Theatre, is different. First-time filmmaker Katherine Acosta goes beyond the iconic images of the protests to ask organizers a simple question: What went wrong?

Jamala Rogers: “Divided We Fall Every Time”

February 16, 2017

This year’s UW Madison activist-in-resident, author of Ferguson is America, and Black Commentator columnist Jamala Rogers considers our film and the Wisconsin Uprising in historical perspective in her essay “Divided We Fall Every Time.”

The documentary is a deep dive into the resistance to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s Act 10. Like most uprisings, it not the one thing that sparks the inferno, it’s a series of things that accumulate until The People can’t take it anymore. Act 10 was that thing that ignited the flame.

Act 10 was part of the Republican playbook to undermine unions and the Labor Movement. To address a nearly $4 billion deficit, the Republican Governor and his cronies in the state legislature decided to target bargaining rights, wages and benefits of public sector employees. Governor Walker unapologetically stated his strategy would be divide-and-conquer, to kick up the tensions between rural and urban citizens. The narrative became the “greedy” public sector workers in the cities were the reason Wisconsin’s small towns were suffering.

Louis Proyect’s Review of Divided We Fall

January 30, 2017

Fortunately for us, a new Barbara Kopple has emerged, namely Katherine M. Acosta, the sociologist and obviously politically advanced director of “Divided We Fall”, a film about the Wisconsin labor struggle that I had the good fortune to watch yesterday. For now, the film has not found a distributor and hopefully this review will inspire some enterprising party to invest in this film that is equal to Kopple at her best and moreover a story that demands the attention of everybody trying to understand how we have ended up with an orange-haired baboon in the White House determined to throw us back to the 1880s. Essentially, the defeat of the public workers struggle in Wisconsin involved all of the players and all of the contradictions that led to the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the nightmare we are now living with.

Even if you’ve read every article about the Wisconsin struggle as it was unfolding in 2011, nothing comes close to seeing exactly how young people and workers rallied to the capitol building to put their bodies on the line to oppose Scott Walker’s anti-labor assault that was as calculated a bid to destroy organized labor that year as Reagan’s firing of the airline controllers was in 1985.

Divided We Fall: Memories of the Wisconsin Uprising in 2011

Paul Buhle/ Portside January 24, 2017

“America is about to be Wisconsinized…”

Historian and author Paul Buhle (It Started in Wisconsin) links the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising and subsequent forcible implementation of Governor Scott Walker’s radical Republican agenda to our current national nightmare in his review of Divided We Fall at Portside.org. America, Buhle says, is about to be “Wisconsinized.”

The story behind the story—the struggle of class forces--has been told in some detail in several books, but a new film, Divided We Fall, directed by Katherine Acosta and now showing up at assorted film festivals, supplies the crucial elements of drama that few of us in the marching crowds understood at the time. It is also a wonderful re-enactment of the whole scene, bringing to life the drama and months’ long glory of a fightback that mirrored and mirrors so many anti-austerity struggles across the world. For anyone interested in how this played out in a Midwest American town, here is a film at least as important as recuperation or analysis of Occupy Wall Street, and likely to be more intimate, taking place as it does in a city of only 200,000 or so.

Selling out

"Divided We Fall" documents the capitulation of unions in the Wisconsin Uprising

by Esty Dinur/ The Isthmus October 13, 2016

As its title suggests, Divided We Fall is not another nostalgia film about the Wisconsin Uprising. Like other movies about the popular response to Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10, it has footage of Wisconsinites marching, drumming and sleeping in the Capitol. But it doesn’t stop there. This documentary by first-time director Katherine Acosta, who has a sociology Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, looks deeply into the mechanisms of the uprising and why it fizzled and, ultimately, failed. Weaving citizens’ videos with numerous interviews, the film offers new information, revealing what happened behind the scenes.

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Institutional Distribution-New Day Films

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Institutional Distribution-New Day Films

Reviews

When newly elected Tea Party governor Scott sought to impose an anti-union and austerity agenda in 2011, Wisconsinites fought back, in the tens of thousands, occupying the statehouse and filling the capitol square for nearly two weeks.

Divided We Fall traces the genesis of one of the largest sustained protests in US history – recapturing the joy, creativity, and determination of activists from diverse walks of life as well as revealing some pitfalls faced by contemporary social movements.

Long-time editor of the Madison-based Progressive magazine, Matt Rothschild, called the Wisconsin Uprising “the single most exhilarating political experience in my life.” He was not alone. It’s hard now to describe the spirit of the protests – the positive energy and good will and camaraderie. Defeat seemed impossible…

Our film combines original in-depth interviews with dramatic citizen-produced video and photos from a wide variety of sources to create a compelling narrative of resistance to the attack on collective bargaining for public workers – the first item in the austerity agenda advanced by Governor Scott Walker’s administration.

Our interviewees include graduate teaching assistants at the center of the movement as well as labor leaders, scholars and pundits such as the late Marty Beil (executive director, AFSCME Council 24), the late Frank Emspak (Workers Independent News), Professor Katherine Cramer (author, The Politics of Resentment) and Matthew Rothschild, long-time editor of the Progressive magazine.

Interviews with Filmmaker

Divided We Fall gets beneath the surface of the mass protests, chants, and rallies to shed light on what really happened in Madison in 2011.

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