By Josie Grove

Fragile Island of Peace is documentary filmmaker Jamil Simon’s examination of the search for “peacebuilding” opportunities in the troubled nation of Burundi.

Somerville-based documentary filmmaker Jamil Simon is working on his latest film, Fragile Island of Peace. The film is a documentary about conflict in the small East African nation of Burundi. Simon is interested in a conflict resolution style called peacebuilding.

Burundi’s twelve-year civil war ended in a United Nations-brokered treaty in 2005, but the country remained volatile. The UN began a peacebuilding mission in 2006 to prevent the simmering conflict from erupting again.

“A peacebuilder works with parties of a conflict and they teach conflict resolution skills and communication skills, how arrive at win-win solutions, how to figure out what interests they have in common, and what goals separate them,” explained Simon. “By and large, once people really start to explore their own self-interest and the interests of the parties they’re on the battlefield with, they often find that what they all want is, or 60% of what they want is similar.

Simon’s partner on the film, Liz McClintock, is intimately familiar with peacebuilding. “Liz is a peacebuilder. She’s worked in South Sudan, she’s worked in Liberia, Sri Lanka, she’s worked in a lot of countries around the world.” McClintock works for CM Partners, a Cambridge, MA conflict management consulting firm that works with private corporations as well as warring factions.

“Liz actually did a lot of the training in Burundi.” Simon followed McClintock as she met with leaders in Burundi, filming the interactions and interviewing them about the experience.

“I believe it’s important to tell people stories about peacebuilding so that people understand that there are alternatives to violence.” Simon worries that people in the United States are not exposed to models of nonviolent conflict resolution, and he blames news coverage of war and violence.  “I’m hoping to get it into the mainstream media. I’d like to get it broadcast on HBO or PBS or ABC or any of those platforms,” said Simon. “I want people to see that even when it’s not perfect, even when the solution is not black and white, and all neatly wrapped up in a bow, that peacebuilding is still far better than violence in resolving conflict. Peacebuilding is something that takes a long-term effort. You might say where do we get the money? But it’s way cheaper than bombing.”

The scale of the peacebuilding operation in Burundi should make the story interesting to audiences outside Burundi, Simon said. “They trained 30,000 people [in peacebuilding techniques] out of a country of 8 million. Imagine if we did the same thing in the United States,” said Simon.

But the film is not just for foreign audiences. “I went in with a commitment to make a film for play in Burundi,” said Simon. When he was filming in Burundi, Simon conducted interviews in both French and Kirundu, the primary language spoken in Burundi. “I have material to put together a really powerful Kirundi version of this film. They need to be reminded of how they achieved a level of peace that was very unusual.”

Simon has finished shooting the film, and has edited ten minutes of footage. This short clip will be screened on Friday, November 13 at Tree of Life Tai Chi Center at 7 p.m. “Learning to walk in the shoes of others was a transformative experience for a lot of these people. And I hope we can capture it in this film.”

Simon hopes the screening this Friday spur a dialogue. “We’re going to have a discussion about what it takes to build peace in a violent world,” said Simon. “It will be a fundraiser and we’ll screen the film, but I’m hoping it will be a conversation, and that people will really learn something.”

The screening will raise money to edit the two versions of the film, Simon said. “There’s still a huge amount of work to do.”