Peace is Loud
- New York, NY, USA
- Global
- peaceisloud.org
- Peace is Loud Vimeo
Channel Focus Area:
Amplifying Gender Equality in Media & Technology
Ensuring Women’s Participation in Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding
Mission:
Peace is Loud uses the power of media to amplify women’s voices for peacebuilding.
Impact:
After her experience producing the powerful 2008 film Pray the Devil Back to Hell, about women activists who helped broker peace in Liberia, Abigail Disney co-founded Peace is Loud to pioneer and refine film impact campaigns that mobilize film audiences to take collective action in support of social justice movements. Since its inception, PIL has organized thousands of film screenings across 86 countries on all 7 continents. The screenings support and inspire community organizing efforts. PIL's film impact work leverages documentaries as tools to strengthen the work of their partners.
PIL has run impact campaigns for many well-known films like Knock Down the House, The Hunting Ground and the two Women, War and Peace series which continue to be used in classrooms.
PIL represents many prominent women peacemakers and human rights activists through its Speakers Bureau including Nobel Prize winner Leymah Gbowee.
Channel Grants:
2025: Channel made a grant to Peace is Loud (PIL) to support their work to “harness the power of storytelling by women, trans, and nonbinary change makers to mobilize strategic collective action grounded in equity and care."
Funds will particularly be used to expand the reach and impact of PIL’s participant care resources through PIL’s Collective Lens training programs. These resources were created and piloted “in collaboration with other filmmakers, mental health experts, and documentary film participants, to fill the gaps they identified as necessary to prioritizing participants’ health and well-being.”
In 2025, PIL published "Shine a Light: A Filmmaker’s Guide to Creating a Duty of Care Plan." Co-created by Margie Ratliff and Stephanie Palumbo, this resource guides filmmakers through the process of establishing a Duty of Care Plan with documentary film participants. This offering is in response to a growing need from the filmmaking community and the people at the heart of their stories to imagine safer and more equitable relationships with one another."
2017: Channel made a grant to Peace is Loud to support their collaboration with partners on the ground for grassroots outreach and engagement around mobile cinema screenings for the documentary film The Uncondemned in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and in Haiti – both countries which have experienced high levels of sexual violence. The film tells the gripping and world-changing story of a group of young international lawyers and activists who fought to make rape a crime of war, and the Rwandan women who came forward to testify and win justice where there had been none.
Peace is Loud uses film as a medium for education, engagement and mobilization and ultimately to build cultures of peace and full realization of women’s human rights.
In the DRC Peace is Loud partnered with groups such as Synergie des Associations Feminines du Congo, which provides a mobile cinema to local communities, and Physicians for Human Rights, which works with mobile gender courts prosecuting crimes of sexual violence. In Haiti, PIL partnered with a wide variety of organizations such as Channel partner Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. PIL has also partnered with UC Hastings in San Francisco to present a teaching module created for The Uncondemned at the Jeremie Law School in Haiti.
2012 & 2013: Channel made two grants to Peace is Loud for the purposes of supporting international grassroots outreach and engagement around the Screening Series-in-a-Box Campaign for the Women, War and Peace films.
Women, War and Peace is a five part film series that spotlights the stories of women in conflict zones from Bosnia to Afghanistan and Colombia to Liberia, placing women at the center of an urgent dialogue about conflict and security, and reframing our understanding of modern warfare. The series, which aired on PBS in Fall 2011, was executive produced by Abigail Disney (producer of Pray the Devil Back to Hell, the extraordinary documentary about the women’s peace movement in Liberia), Gini Reticker, and Pamela Hogan, and is now available to view online in the U.S.
For the Screening Series-in-a-Box campaign, Peace is Loud coordinated the distribution of thousands of screening kits and resource guides free of charge to partner organizations working in conflict zones, pre and post-conflict areas and at-risk communities worldwide. The kits included DVDs with all five films and a discussion and resource guide. The guide, which is also available online, includes tools and resources for building leadership and organizing skills, especially among women.
In addition, the guide features interviews with women activists who are working to empower local communities to find peaceful solutions to conflict, including women who are featured in the films. To maximize accessibility, particularly in the regions the series covers, dubbed films and translated guides are offered in Arabic, French, Spanish and English.
Through partner NGOs, faith-based communities and grassroots groups, the screening kits reached the women and men directly impacted by conflict—the actors in peacebuilding.