Hearts and Minds and David Batstone

Who is David Batstone?  He was the man who in 1986 took Bono and Ali on a tour through El Salvador and Nicaragua, providing experiences for Bono which got channelled into the songs “Bullet the Blue Sky” and “Mothers of the Disappeared” for U2’s The Joshua Tree.

Batstone wrote of this trip for the book accompanying the boxed set of U2’s re-issue of The Joshua Tree last year.

Fast forward to now, and Batstone is the president of the Not For Sale Campaign, an organization fighting human trafficking and leading the campaign to “end slavery in our lifetime.”  He shows up in the new film Call + Response, “the first feature rockumentary to expose the world’s 27 million most terrifying secrets,”  which opened in select American cities October 10 and should be going into wider release soon.

Along with Batstone, there are plenty of other A-list actors, musicians and intellectual and political  heavyweights in the film.  Bono and the music of U2 are absent from the film, curiously, because it seems like the sort of project that’s a natural fit for a cameo or song clip.  Maybe there’s something in the works??

Call + Response covers a lot of ground, but the efforts of The Garden of Hope in Chiang Mai, Thailand, are featured prominently in the film.

If you’re looking to engage the ol’ heart and mind, please check out The Garden of Hope and look for the nearest theater showing Call + Response.

The Garden of Hope is one of the organizations featured at the upcoming academic conference on U2 — “The Hype and The Feedback: A Conference Exploring the Music, Work and Influence of U2″ — for which @U2 is proud to be the Media Partner.

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