Political Docs & POV

Week 6

SHANNON WALSH / SM2229/ FALL 2014

SCHOOL OF CREATIVE MEDIA, CITY UNIVERSITY HONG KONG

Documentary for social change

Can films change the world?

• Long history of documentary & social change

“Challenge for Change” project at NFB

Challenge for Change (French: Societé Nouvelle) was a participatory film and video project created by the National Film Board of Canada in 1967, the Canadian Centennial. Active until 1980, Challenge for Change used film and video production to illuminate the social concerns of various communities within Canada, with funding from eight different departments of the Canadian government. The impetus for the program was the belief that film and video were useful tools for initiating social change and eliminating poverty.

In total, the program would lead to the creation of over 140 films and videos across the country, including 27 films by Colin Low about life on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, produced in 1967. Known collectively as The Fogo Island Project, these Fogo Island films had an enormous impact on the future direction of the program, and were created thanks to the vision of Newfoundland academic Donald Snowden, who saw a need for a community media project as early as 1965.

Started by John Kemeny, Colin Low, Fernand Dansereau and Robert Forget, and later run by George C. Stoney, the Challenge for Change program was designed to give voice to the “voiceless”. A key aspect of Challenge for Change was the transfer of control over the filmmaking process from professional filmmakers to community members, so that ordinary Canadians in underrepresented communities could tell their own stories on screen. Community dialogue and government responses to the issues were crucial to the program and took precedence over the “quality” of the films produced.

As the program developed, responsibility for the film production was put increasingly into the hands of community members, who both filmed events and had a say in the editing of the films, through advance screenings open only those who were the subjects of the films.

From Wiki:

The political?

“When you embark upon a project you have to be prepared to be changed by it forever. You have to be prepared to search, to go with the flow, and yet to maintain a point of view that’s not a fixed one, that is truly open to a dialogue and a living exchange with people. That’s what I love about documentary.”

-Marielle Nitoslawska, “Bad Girl, Breaking the Frame”

“Screening Truth to Power”(2013)

Cinema Politica network

5 Broken Cameras (2011)Guy Davidi, Emad Burnat

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993) Alanis Obomsawin

Paris is Burning (1990)Jennie Livingston

Gas Land (2010)Josh Fox

Shoah (1982) Claude Lanzemann

The Interrupters(2011)Steve James

The Punk Singer: A film about Kathleen Hanna (2013)Sini Anderson