Our country is currently fighting a war in the name of democracy, spending money and losing lives. It seems like an especially appropriate time to ask: What is democracy? Why democracy? These are the questions the past week’s democracy film series aimed to inspire.

Over the span of four days beginning on Oct. 1, five films that explored the topic of democracy were shown in Olin Hall.

Senior politics major Yukta Kumar spearheaded bringing the films to campus. Over the summer, she interned for Steps International, which commissioned the films in order to ignite a global conversation about democracy.

“Basically, the internship was building the global online space for the discussion to happen. They had the movies, they had everything, but there was no online space. They had a Web site but not an interactive one,” said Kumar.

A group of international students traveled to Africa to work on creating a forum for the project.

“So they had six interns come in from across the world: a girl from Denmark, a guy from Denmark, a guy from India, me, a girl from Sweden who was Greek and a girl from Nigeria that was also British. We all went down to South Africa, Cape Town, and basically lived and worked together in one house. We had nothing; we had a blank slate,” said Kumar.

Steps International partnered with broadcasters across the globe and coordinated worldwide screenings of 10 documentary films.

“Considering that we all were university students, we really wanted to get it out to our universities, and also to universities globally. So that’s how we organized this university screening before the global broadcast,” said Kumar.

The experience forced the interns to explore their conceptions of democracy, just as the films hoped to do for a global audience.

“Part of it was also coming to terms with democracy ourselves. We couldn’t really define democracy and started off trying to decide what we wanted from this. Do we just want to be able to define democracy? Do we just want to get people talking about it? What is the end or what is the path that we envisioned? At the end of it we had so many debates and so many contradictions because we just had too many diverse views in one room,” said Kumar.

Whitman received five of the films for free, and Kumar approached ASWC Films Chair Teal Greyhavens about coordinating the screenings. With the help of ASWC and friends, Kumar was able to launch the screenings successfully.

“I feel like a lot of people take democracy for granted, and they don’t question beyond that. What does it take for democracy to be a success? Everyone talks about the Western paradigm of democracy and how it shouldn’t be imposed, and it shouldn’t, but I feel as though there’s still a distinction between what the crux of democracy is and why that is important, versus the additional complexities of it that become its own for a particular country or a particular type of people,” said sophomore Ashma Basnyat, who helped Kumar coordinate the screenings.

“I really just wanted people to start talking about democracy and politics, their notions and conceptions. Democracy is such an overused term that it kind of just washes over us. I don’t think we stop, think about it and question it,” said Kumar.

The first film was a Chinese documentary called “Please Vote For Me,” which follows a classroom of children who undertake their first election for class monitor. This is the children’s first hands-on experience with democracy and is a funny and poignant microcosm of the electoral process.

The second film, “Taxi to the Dark Side,” explores U.S. torture and abuse in the war on terror. It explores the case of an Afghani taxi driver who is taken prisoner and tortured to death by the U.S. military.

“Looking for the Revolution,” the third film, takes a closer look at the Bolivian revolution, and concludes that the system is as corrupt as ever, despite rhetoric to the contrary.

Then followed “Dinner with the President,” a look at the president of Pakistan, an ally of the U.S. The filmmaker sits down to dinner with President Parvez Musharraf and his mother. She then talks to a diverse sample of Pakistani citizens about democracy. The underlying question posed is what role a military dictatorship can have in fostering democracy.

The series ends on an inspiring note with “Iron Ladies of Liberia.” The film follows Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the first female head of state in Africa, through her first year in office as she struggles to rebuild war-torn Liberia.

The event, however, is supposed to continue long after the movies are over.

“People need to go online and join the global debate, and that’s www.whydemocracy.net. And I think that’s really important. There’s so much going on in this world. We use this term discourse so much at Whitman, and it’s really about practicing it, too, and really getting into discussions and debates,” said Kumar.