[Montréal, Québec, Canada 24°C] The 2010 Citizen Media Rendez-Vous is now behind me after three months of dedicated time to its coordination. As I contemplate my next moves, I invite everyone interested in citizen media to view the Livestream Archive of the two panel discussions.
Montréal — Monday, August 23, 2010
10:30 am – 1:00 pm Panel A: Accessing and appropriating citizen media to better inform and mobilize the public
Opening words by Alain Ambrosi
“The long battle for the democratization of communication: citizen media at the cutting edge.”
Introduction by the moderator, Patricia Bergeron
Presentations by the invited panelists
* Norman Cohn, co-founder IsumaTV (Montréal – Igloolik)
* Tim McSorley, editor Media Co-opertive (CAN – Montréal)
* Georgia Popplewell, Managing Director Global Voices (TRINIDAD & TOBAGO)
* Craig Silverman, Managing Editor MediaShift (USA) & Digital Journalism Director OpenFile (Toronto)
* Jean-Noé Landry, co-founder Montréal Ouvert (Montréal)
[Montréal, Québec, Canada 22°C] August 23, 2010 is a special day in St-Henry, a traditionally working class area of Montréal that is nestled southwest of downtown just north of the Lachine Canal. Parabola Films is documenting the neighbourhood’s cultural landscape in a single day with 12 crews roaming the streets and alleys.
The project, St-Henry, the 26th of August, is directed by Shannon Walsh, a Montréal-based filmmaker whose feature documentary, H2Oil, traces the high human and environmental costs of the Alberta tar sands. It is co-written by her and Denis Valiquette who grew up in the neighbourhood, where he lived until 2002. Some of the 12 crew directors include Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette (Le Ring), Tracey Deer (Mohawk Girls), Amy Miller (Myths for Profit) and others.
Why so many crews? Why St-Henry? Why today, you may ask? According to the film’s website,
“Our film is inspired by the 1962 documentary classic, “À St-Henri le 5 septembre”, in which a group of young Quebec filmmakers also sought to describe the then working class neighbourhood of St-Henri over the course of a single, randomly chosen day. Their documentary captured the particular character of an historic and political moment of everyday life in Quebec, as well as the spirit of direct-cinema at that time.”
À St-Henry le 5 septembre is a National Film board of Canada documentary (embedded below) that gives us a glimpse of a bygone era, and it will be interested to see how today’s film crews will capture a place changed from a half-century that has brought the world into a digital age we have yet to fully understand the implications.
I was lucky to work with the project’s Lead Director of Photography, Julien Fontaine (La Théorie de tout, Les Porteurs d’espoir) and soundman, Christoph Motte. I volunteered for just a couple of hours on the project and slowly drove a pickup truck along St-Henry’s streets and back alleys as Christoff recorded ambient sound and Julien recorded footage strapped in the back with his Steadycam. I was just the driver, but I got the chance to do some production assistance after an interview with a St-Henry resident outside a local dépaneur by having him sign release forms. It was a pleasure watching talented people at work.
I look forward to watching the final edited film and comparing it with the original inspiration.
[Montréal, Québec, Canada 23°C] Participants at the 2010 Citizen Media Rendez-Vous are lucky that Shubhranshu Choudhary is spending 3 months in San Francisco this summer because it allowed us to invite him to be a panelist. He is from the Indian region of Chhattisgarh where tribal languages flourish. Poverty is high despite the abundance of minerals in the region and so is illiteracy.
Shubhranshu will come to Montréal to share his perspective based on his experience establishing a citizen journalism initiative that allows remote communities (7 million people) to use CGNet Swara, a cell phone platform inform each other in their own tribal dialects.
Shubhranshu said in an AlertNet interview, “People just have to call up and they can hear news in four different languages – Gondi, Kurruk, Chhattisgarhi and Hindi. It’s helped to bridge the information gap for tribals who are on the other side of the digital divide.” The project, started in February 2010 now receives about 50 calls a day, some to record audio messages and news, while others to listen to the reports left by others from their remote region. All messages are verified by Shubhranshu and the project’s volunteers by others on the ground before translating the messages and reinserting them into the system.
Shubhranshu is bringing a communication revolution to Chhattisgarh where more than 50% of the communities do not have electricity. He is coming to Montréal’s Citizen Media Rendez-Vous on August 23. Are you?
[Montréal, Québec, Canada 23°C] I just finished watching Japanese director, Yoshihiro Nakamura’s 10th film, Fish Story and the title track is now playing over and over in a video loop and I just can’t enough of it. I want to buy the album but the website is entirely in Japanese so I’ve embedded the video to get easy access to the song whenever I need a taste of pre-Sex Pistols Japanese punk rock.
The film is good too. A definite keeper and future cult classic, that is, if we survive the 2012 Apocalypse. The film is set in several time lines and along multiple narratives. In 2012, an old man walks into the only store in Tokyo that is still open, just 5 hours before a giant comet is scheduled to hit earth and end the world. Inside is the record store clerk and a music enthusiast apparently oblivious to the disaster. The clerk slides Fish Story onto the turntable and we are led to believe that punk rock is about to save the world. I believe.
The film brings us to 1975 when a punk rock band records its third and last album, before being disbanded by their record producers. They are too avant guarde for their time. During the late nineties, a high school girl stuck on a ferry that gets hijacked then saved by a pastry cook who was brought up to be the Champion of Justice, every boy’s dream. It’s 1999 and the end of the world ends up being a false alarm. Early 1980s as a coward is told by a girl he meets in a restaurant that if he stands up for himself, he will meet a girl and end up saving the world.
Each of these segments are neatly tied together as the Fish Story theme song thrashes in the background right before the credits. I already want to watch it again. It recently played at Montréal’s 2010 Fantasia International Film Festival. It hope is gets into video stores soon, so I can talk about it with friends.
[Montréal, Québec, Canada 24°C] CitizenShift, Parole citoyenne, the Institut du nouveau monde (INM), Media@McGill, Alternatives and Communautique invite bloggers, engaged filmmakers, photographers, citizen journalists, media experts, independent media practitioners and others to the 2nd Citizen Media Rendez-Vous on Monday, August 23, 2010 at the Palais des congrès de Montréal. This international event begins at 8:30 am and runs until 6:00 pm, with networking sessions, 2 panel discussions, a Cinema Politica Rendez-Vous screening room and a multimedia exhibit of posters from 40 years of social movements in Québec related to media. The event is open to the public and will provide a venue for discussing topics such as content creation using diverse technology platforms and applying collaborative models for citizen media.
Participatory media projects that include multiple platforms, genres and issues are adding diversity to conversations at a speed and across distances that are changing the way people communicate with one another. A goal of the Citizen Media Rendez-Vous is to encourage a collaborative exchange to learn about, and advance the practices of, citizen media that cultivate inclusive participation and social justice. Continue reading →
[Montréal, Québec, Canada 11°C] I can’t believe I’ve been offline for such a long time. Whatever, I’m back with a video reportage I edited and helped produce with a group of students from Louis-Joseph-Papineau High School in the St-Michel neighbourhood of Montréal. I was hired as a filmmaker/journalist to mentor this group of students make a documentary film / reportage. The subject they chose was themselves: Le Foyer 636, a special class of students that follow a particular curriculum to help them move forward with their learning and encourage them to stay in school and not drop out. They wanted to show a positive angle of themselves, contrary of what others in the school believe who often treat as “dimwits” or worse.
As their teachers reveal during interviews in the French-language film (embedded below), the students have a lack of academic motivation, problems with drug and alcohol consumption, street gang issues, atention deficit, among other distractions. During the two-month project, Simon (co-mentor) and I, met with the students nearly a dozen times to teach them how to develop their story, use the video/audio equipment, conduct an interview, scout locations, and most importantly, to trust in their abilities to complete the tasks we set before them. The usually met and often surpassed our expectations. Continue reading →
[Montréal, Québec, Canada 10°C] Today is election day in Sudan, the first of three days of polling. It is the first multi-party elections in Sudan since 1986, three years before the 1989 coup-d’état that brought Omar al-Bashir’s National Islamic Front – NIF (later renamed the National Congress Party – NCP) party to power.
It has been five years since the end of a 21-year civil war between the government of Sudan and the southern SPLM rebels that killed two million people and displaced more than four million others in Africa’s largest country. According to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the people of Southern Sudan will probably vote in a self-determination referendum in 2010 that is expected to result in a seperation vote.
The detailed results of this week’s elections are uncertain, but Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir will almost certainly win the presidency of Sudan and SalvaKiir Mayardit is expected to win the Presidency of Southern Sudan’s semi-autonomous region. But these anticipated results are not without controversy during these elections when votes will be cast for two presidents, 24 governors and 26 state and national assemblies on up to 12 different ballots. The logistical challenges for holding these elections have already shown errors.
Africa correspondent for The Globe and Mail, Geoffrey York, has reported via Twitter that cardboard polling booths tend to blow away in the wind, that some polling stations failed to open on time because polling material had yet to arrive, or had received the wrong polling papers, that some polling stations stayed open three hours longer than planned, and that there is talk of adding a fourth day of polling to the elections.
Reuters reported that “confusion soon erupted on Sunday as centre after centre, sometimes hours into the voting, discovered that voters were using the wrong ballot papers or that names or symbols of candidates were either missing or incorrect.”
(source: SPLM Voices)
Most of the six million registered voters are participating in elections for the first time. With low literacy rates, particularly in the South, Continue reading →
During a visit to Southern Sudan in March and April 2009, I visited multiple projects funded by the Canadian International Development Agency. This short video shows a project managed by the UN's International Organization for Migration in Northern Bahr el Ghazal State to provide schools, women's centres, and borehole wells for communities of returnees in the region.
For more about Southern Sudan, visit: http://southsudaninfo.net
