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IFP Market Conference 2003: "Documentaries: Making an Impact"

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Posted on November 13, 2003

A Panel at the IFP

The 25th Annual IFP Market was a meeting place for hundreds of filmmakers, distributors, broadcasters and vendors. Courtesy of IFP/New York.

MediaRights.org actively heralds the importance of outreach to the filmmaking community by participating on panels at important festivals and conferences. These panels offer great opportunities for discussion and a chance to find out how leaders in the field of media activism are thinking strategically about current events.

The 25th Annual IFP Market took place from September 21-26 in New York City. This five-day event was an opportunity for thousands of filmmakers to meet with industry and creative professionals. The week was jam-packed with screenings of both works-in-progress and completed films seeking distribution deals. The market also featured a lively conference with more than 40 seminars and workshops presented by industry leaders who discussed the critical issues facing independent filmmakers today.

One of the most well attended panel discussions was "Documentaries: Making an Impact." The panel moderator, Alyce Myatt, has worn various hats in the documentary filmmaking community as a programmer for PBS, a program officer for the MacArthur Foundation, a media consultant and a producer. She is currently the multimedia editor of One World TV, a sub-site of OneWorld.net, a global network of over 1,500 non-governmental organizations aggregating information on human rights and sustainable development issues.

The panelists included MediaRights.org's Executive Director, Nicole Betancourt, Barbara Abrash, the Associate Director of the

Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University, Gillian Caldwell, the Executive Director of WITNESS; DeeDee Halleck, Founder of

Paper Tiger Television and Co-Founder of

Deep Dish TV,

Peter Kinoy, Co-Founder of Skylight Pictures, and Diane Weyermann, Director of the

Sundance Institute Documentary Fund.

(For complete bios of all participants, scroll to the bottom and click on "Bios".)

An audience of filmmakers and industry professionals filled the room and participated in the discussion at the "Documentaries: Making an Impact" panel. Courtesy of IFP/New York.

During the course of the discussion, several themes emerged: 1) the current global crisis and what media makers can and should do to make an impact, 2) the threat of media conglomeration and what we can do to oppose it and 3) the importance of distribution and funding of independent social-issue documentary films.

Global Crisis A Call to Action

Filmmaker and activist Peter Kinoy began his remarks by quoting Victor Hugo's timeless mantra: "there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come." All the panelists seemed to agree that the current global crisis (war, poverty, environmental deterioration, etc.) has created an urgent need for something to be done, and that this "something" requires the creativity and collaboration of media makers.

Ironically, however, Peter Kinoy articulated that as conflict intensifies and the need for effective media heightens, media makers have a tendency to compete with one another rather than to share and collaborate. He posed the question "Is media helping to alleviate the current crisis?" and answered it by insisting that it is not doing as much as it can and should.

Media has become an increasingly effective tool for creating social change. Whether it is changing individual minds or changing policy, media, and specifically documentary filmmaking, can and is being used to impact both popular thought and policy.

For his part, Kinoy has been an active participant and educator with the Media College of the University of the Poor, the educational arm of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign. The Media College is part of a national effort led by poor and homeless women, men and children of all races who use media to raise the issue of poverty as a human rights. Through his participation as an educator in the Media College, Peter has been working with over 60 poverty groups with a goal of uniting these groups and helping them to make media about their situations.

Each of the other panelists are answering Kinoy's call to action, each in their own way through media activism, involvement in policy-making and through providing an outlet for social-issue documentaries with an agenda.

The panel took place in the Puck Building located in SoHo, Manhattan. Courtesy of IFP/New York.

Producer, teacher and writer, Barbara Abrash, talked about her interest in how media can create social change and how this change can be evaluated. She advocated an approach of creating tactical media, which she described as an "interactive, high impact form of media creation and distribution." AIDS activist organization Act Up was a pioneer in the late 80s using a similar formula with video and street theatre.

Abrash, along with her colleague Faye Ginsburg from NYU's Center for Media, Culture and History and a group of esteemed contributors, are working on a series of Virtual Case Books, the first of which is entitled "9-11 and After". This interactive online project is powered by flash animation and functions as a portal for essays, reports and media in response to the events of 9-11 and after. Future Virtual Case Books will address such topics as HIV/AIDS activism and human rights.

Abrash emphasized the importance of technology and cross-platform opportunities and she posed four key questions for consideration in strategizing about tactical media:

How can we create a reasonable economic model?
How can we create a more permanent and stable organizational base?
How can we compete?
How do we evaluate quality?

Of course, all of these important questions cannot even be explored if independent and diverse media is stifled by media conglomeration.

Media Conglomeration When Too Few Control Too Much

Compounding the urgency of the global crisis that Peter Kinoy underscored is the increasingly oppressive force of media conglomeration. That is, the fact that fewer and fewer international mega-corporations control more and more smaller media organizations, thereby limiting the outlets for independent voices and controlling the public's access to media diversity. This issue, which is being taken up by groups such as Public Knowledge, the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers and MoveOn.org, is one in which panelist DeeDee Halleck is deeply invested.

Halleck, one of the contributors to Abrash's "9-11 and After" Virtual Case Book, has been working with Deep Dish Television, Free Speech TV, IndyMedia and others to provide information and creative responses to events that are happening in the US and abroad.

The veteran activist and filmmaker works to get the popular political radio show Democracy Now! on television through a network of several hundred community stations. Halleck also fights against media conglomeration through participating in the World Summit on the Information Society. This United Nations organized summit is a multi-phased meeting of Heads of State, Executive Heads of United Nations agencies, industry leaders, non-governmental organizations, media representatives and civil society to discuss the rapidly evolving global information society and the challenges that it poses to all aspects of our lives. Media ownership is one of the items on the agenda.

Halleck was one of the few representatives from the United States at one of three preparatory meetings in Geneva at which the agenda for the summit is being planned. She will be at the first summit meeting in Geneva in December and urges other media makers and activists to participate online or to attend the summit's World Forum on Communication Rights in Geneva on December 11th.

One important way that we can work to combat media conglomeration is to think creatively about alternative outlets for social issue media.

Funding and Distributing Independent Voices

One panelist who is supporting documentary filmmaking is Diane Weyermann of the Sundance Institute's Documentary Fund. This program gives development and finishing grants to films on contemporary social-issues. She described these projects as "the opposite of what you see on the news" and emphasized getting these documentaries to audiences.

The Sundance Film Festival is also working to support independent social-issue documentaries by highlighting them in their annual festival. Weyermann called attention to the hard-hitting international film, To Live is Better Than to Die, about AIDS in China. After being included in the Sundance Film Festival, this important film was broadcast received many broadcast and distribution bids including one from HBO.

Like the other panelists, Diane is concerned with "the global crisis" and she underscored the importance of funding and distributing both American and international films on important social-issues.

MediaRights.org Executive Director, Nicole Betancourt, described the organization's ongoing commitment to the distribution of independent social-issue documentaries. MediaRights.org supports these films with both online and offline projects such as outreach case studies and the Independent Producers' Outreach Toolkit.

An important facet of distribution that the organization emphasizes is conducting well- targeted outreach for films that have the potential to make an impact. Betancourt urged filmmakers to "define your audience and to start early" in planning their outreach. She also encouraged documentary makers to "think about your documentary as an activist campaign find partners who are already working on the issue and seek funding from nonprofits, foundations and individuals who support your cause."

Working Together to Create Global Media

One priority all the panelists share is the importance of creating media that examines, critiques and bears witness to the events happening in conjunction with the United States' foreign policy activities.

Gillian Caldwell spoke about the efforts of the non-profit organization for which she serves as the Executive Director, WITNESS. Musician and songwriter Peter Gabriel founded WITNESS after the Rodney King beating in 1992 and ensuing riots in Los Angeles. Recognizing the significance of video as a mechanism for bearing witness to human rights violations, WITNESS dedicated itself to putting cameras in the hands of individuals who could document these types of offenses around the world. They work in six key areas:

Education and organizing
Using video as evidence in court
On-line broadcasting
Television broadcasting (they produced some spots for the Oxygen network and used the money they received for conducting offline outreach)
Targeted screenings before key decision-makers
Using video as a deterrent for abuse

Over the years, WITNESS has shifted focus from sending activists with cameras to document cases of oppression, to training and providing resources and equipment to people who are the victims of these violations so that they can tell their own stories.

DeeDee Halleck further emphasized this notion of bearing witness when she discussed the importance of participating in a global community of media makers and activists who are working to document current affairs. Halleck called attention to the IndyMedia supported project, Al-Muajaha (translation: "Iraqi Witness"), an online interactive news source created by Iraqi students to document their experiences.

Al-Muajaha aims to fill the information gap between Iraq and the rest of the world. For decades Iraq was isolated from the global community - Al-Muajaha's mission is to dismantle the misperceptions born of those years of seclusion. Through video making and by creating their own independent newspaper, Al-Muajaha, like the projects of WITNESS, demonstrates how American media makers can assist the efforts of independent groups working to tell their own stories despite the oppressive limitations of their environment.

All in all, the panel was a wonderful opportunity to listen to the success stories and concerns of a group of individuals at the forefront of media activism, outreach and distribution. Although the panelists expressed their apprehension about the global situation and growing media conglomeration, they also called attention to the many individuals and organizations that are working to tell important stories and to get these stories seen and heard.

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