In this brief video (produced by Ellie Magnuson), my colleague Bukeni Waruzi, Program Manager for Africa and the Middle East, gives a spirited overview of the background, timeline, and strategy of our partnership with CEMIRIDE, a Kenyan organization representing the Endorois community in their long legal struggle to return to their indigenous lands around Lake Bogoria.

Campaign background: In 2006, WITNESS and CEMIRIDE produced a video that was successfully submitted as evidence at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The Endorois were evicted from their lands by the Kenyan government in the 70’s and the evidentiary video aimed to show the devastating results of the relocation to the Endorois’ living conditions and to present video evidence that these conditions are in violation of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. In Febrary 2010, this long process culminated in the landmark endorsement by the African Union of the African Commission’s ruling for the return of the Endorois land and compensation.

Technical notes: This video contains some nice archival shots of the training in video advocacy, camera work, and editing, provided to CEMIRIDE by WITNESS over the course of a few years. I shot the interview with Bukeni in March 2010 on a Sony HDR-XR550E camcorder, in AVCHD format, and edited it in FinalCut 7.0 as Apple ProRes 422 (Proxy) codec in a 720p sequence. The archival footage comes from PAL and NTSC miniDV tapes and was directly dropped in the timeline without conversion. My goal was to come up with a quick AVCHD to web/YouTube workflow.

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