NOTE: As part of my job here at WITNESS, I have watched more than 2,000 videos on the Hub alone since I joined the team in mid-2008. Different videos have stuck with me for different reasons – some visceral, others more rational. Selecting just ten of these – and you’ll see I also snuck in a couple of extras – has been extremely hard. My criteria has been simply to choose those that I think are worth seeing, either because of their content, tactics, visuals, or because they have been inspiring to me personally. Also, I have deliberately not chosen videos that have already surfaced in our other Top 10 retrospectives. With that mind, this list is admittedly subjective and unscientific – even still, I hope you find little bits of value in these videos, as I did. Finally, we would be really interested to hear from you too – if you have something to share, please leave a comment in the field below or upload your own video. Also be sure to explore our other Top 10 posts to get a broader sense of the Hub content and community since our launch in 2007. Thanks! Priscila PS – These videos are listed in no particular order!
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1) the clean hands project – this video introduces us to a special collaboration between the Jagaran Media Center in Nepal and the Advocacy Project in the U.S.
that trained 13 Nepali activists and journalists from the Dalit “untouchable” caste to use photography and video to tell their own stories and counter the discrimination against Dalits. In three months, more than 4,000 photographs and 60 hours of footage had been produced. What I especially love about this video are the testimonies from the Nepali activists who participated in the project and the commitment to building local – and long-lasting – capacity…
(PS – for another initiative along similar lines, see this Internews video about a training program that helps refugees produce locally-relevant news for their own community radio stations in Chad)
2) Pablo Fajardo – we had the privilege of meeting and interviewing Pablo at the 2009 ELAW Conference, where we also spoke with environmental lawyers from around the world.
Pablo is an Ecuadorean lawyer and activist who is representing 30,000 Indigenous people and rainforest dwellers from the Ecuadorean Amazon in a landmark $27 billion lawsuit against U.S. oil giant ChevronTexaco for years of environmental devastation in the region. To sum it up, I’ll borrow words from Hub user Shannon0, who left a comment on the post we did about the case: “I’m proud of Pablo Fajardo and Luis Yanza for being the strength of their people and fighting for justice despite having become targets of increasing harassment, intimidation, and death threats over the years…” To learn more about the case, go to ChevronToxico.org and see this interview with filmmaker Joe Berlinger, who just completed a documentary about the legal battle called CRUDE.
3) Hub user ANIS (Brazil’s Institute of Bioethics, Human Rights, and Gender) has contributed a remarkable set of masterly crafted advocacy videos that tell poignant personal stories whilst tackling extremely complex and controversial human rights issues.
In Alone and Anonymous, for example, we are left to grapple with the nuances of human dignity with profound questions about what happens when the right to life collides with the right to die – and who gets to decide… In Severina’s Story, A Disembodied Woman, Habeas Corpus, and Four Women (later used as evidence in the Brazilian Supreme Court), we’re touched by different accounts of violence against women and introduced to the human faces of issues like reproductive rights. And finally in The House of the Dead, we are taken into a psychiatric prison in northeast Brazil to bear witness to the realities of at least 4,500 people living with mental disabilities that are incarcerated in prisons and denied adequate treatment or protection.
4) Video to circumvent repression – holding up a video camera can be an extremely risky endeavor, but people are still finding ways to do so. Here are two great examples:
In Saudi Arabia, activists organized a hunger strike via Facebook to protest the unfair detention of 11 human rights activists. In interviews with the Hub, one activist explained that the internet was “the only way of getting the message out” and that “[speaking out] was worth the risks” of political persecution and harassment. In Tibet, Tibetan filmmakers Dhondup Wangchen and Golog Jigme were arrested and subjected to torture after completing Leaving Fear Behind, a film that showcases the voices and opinions of Tibetans in Tibet about the 2008 Beijing Olympics (Golog has since been freed and the campaign for Dhondup’s release continues on – read more here and here).
5) Just plain creative. If you’re looking for new and more
“out-of-the-box” ways of communicating your issues, here are three good places to seek inspiration: *The Yes Men (a collective of activists that use pranks to shame corporations and governments who try to abuse or ignore human rights…); *Animations for Human Rights – see Breakthrough’s Oops I did it again! or Hub user Draxtor’s Virtual Guantanamo in Second Life; * Last but not least, Video the Vote’s 2008, which explains “simple” concepts like democracy, oppression, election monitoring and voter suppression with the help of bright pink stick figures… beautiful and effective.
6) Media that Matters! – if you love socially-oriented documentaries as much as I do, be sure to
explore Arts Engine’s channel on the Hub. Every year, Arts Engine organizes the Media that Matters Film Festival in New York to “connect media makers and active audiences in order to spur critical consideration of pressing social issues.” My favorites from this year include The Next Wave and Why Do White People Have Black Spots? Worth your time!
7) The next generations – For videos that showcase
youth perspectives, here are 5 great ones: *Green Prodigies webisode series (which features two brothers ages 8 and 10 talking about saving the environment for the sake of their futures); *ActionAid’s participatory media project (in which children in Nepal report on the consequences of climate change on their lives); *Like you, we have rights too, from Amnesty International Philippines (featuring Indigenous youth from around the country); and *Doin’ It: Sex, Disability and Videotape (made by The Empowered Fe Fes, a group of young women aged 16-24 living with disabilities and exploring their sexualities). Finally, for an impassioned defense of human rights by a young activist from New Orleans see this interview with Briana O’Neil from the Fire Youth Squad (guaranteed to make you smile).
8) Silence Speaks – a project of the Center for Digital Storytelling, Silence Speaks uses video and digital technologies
as tools for healing, transformation, and justice. The group holds workshops for “youth and adult communities that have been denied a voice” such as “people living in poverty, survivors of trauma, and those who face social stigma due to chronic medical conditions.” In the workshops, participants share their stories and collaborate to create digital narratives about their experiences. Here’s more about their mission in their own words: “these first-person stories aim to challenge media legacies of voyeurism and naturalized representation by ensuring that workshop participants, and not producers, have primary control over what is shared and how events and people are portrayed.” Two particularly moving testimonies for me were Richard’s Story, about surviving war in Uganda, and Jamie’s Story of domestic violence in the U.S.
9) Ethics of online video in the era of Web 2.0 – this is one of the themes we grapple with constantly in our work here in Brooklyn and around the world. What are the ethics of creating, distributing, and sharing human rights media? And what are the new opportunities – as well as the new risks – that the internet presents for human rights activists in the 21st century?
Here are a couple of posts and videos that begin to explore these issues:
*Cameras Everywhere: Human Rights and the Ethics of Ubiquitous Video
*Iran Protests: A Woman Dies on Camera – to post or not to post?
*Honest Truths: What are the Ethics of Making Documentaries?
*Burma: Shooting, owning, sharing, watching video, shouting with glee at a TV broadcast… can earn you years in jail
*Guest Post: Notes from Burma – Story v. Security
*Should You Believe Your Eyes? Allegations of a Doctored Video from Sri Lanka
*What Can Civil Society Learn from Evgeny Morozov’s Critique of Web 2.0?
10) Video for change in communities dealing with the consequences of war – this video is one of my favorites
because it encapsulates the meaning of video advocacy in a way no textbook could. The video shows how AJEDI-Ka, WITNESS’ partner in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), used one of our co-productions – On the Frontlines – to mobilize and inform local communities in the DRC about child soldiers and the dangers of encouraging or allowing children to voluntarily enlist in war. What this particular video illustrates so beatifully is that making the video is not enough if the right people don’t see it. I love watching the scenes of the communities debating the issue of child soldiers after seeing the video. For me, this is one more piece of evidence of the power of video to foster dialogue and lead to real change.
MORE ON 2 YEARS OF THE HUB
Top 10 Most Covered (And Responded To) Issues
**A huge thank you to Marianna Moneymaker for all her work on this!