Pipope Panitchpakdi“It’s Like Being Out There Naked.”
That’s the reason given by Thai film maker and media activist Pipope Panitchpakdi why he doesn’t want to be present when his films are being screened.
A reporter at the recent Mekong Media Forum held in Chiang Mai, Thailand, noted how Pipope headed for the door when his ambitious 2009 documentary, Mekong: The Untamed began to be screened on the first day.
Asked why he was stepping out, he replied: “I don’t like to watch when my films are shown. It’s like being out there naked.”
Fair enough – there isn’t one right way to handle such public sharing, and each film maker does it differently. I know some who simply want to be there from beginning to end, derive great satisfaction from being acknowledged upfront, and are eager to engage the audience after the screening (I’m one of this type). A few prefer to sit quietly and unrecognised amidst the viewers, observing candid reactions of the audience, and may (or may not) own up in the end. Then there are those who leave the room.
But one thing every film maker I know shares with equal passion is that their film be screened with proper visual and sounds. This isn’t as easily or commonly accomplished as you’d think – I’ve seen a good film sharing moment ruined by technical glitches in too many countries, both developed and developing. Having been the victim of such mishaps, I know just how unnerving and frustrating this can be. Ours may be the digital age, but video and audio literacy levels are still very uneven.
Have you had such an experience as a film maker or film user? If so, please share it here!
Earlier this week, United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 (COP15) in Copenhagen opened with an apocalyptic video showing the world torn asunder from a variety of disasters.
As one reviewer wrote: “The portrayal sought to play up on the fears of the world should a worst case scenario develop from global warming. The entire video is reminiscent of the recent disaster movie blockbuster, 2012that was released in movie theatres in recent months.
I haven’t yet seen 2012, now showing in a theatre close to me, so I can’t comment on the comparison. But here’s the video, now playing on COP15 channel on YouTube:
In the video, a child goes to sleep peacefully but wakes to find herself in a desert wasteland. As she sets out to explore, the very land on which she stands begins to crack open and she flees. The girl doesn’t make it far before she looks up to see the world’s largest tornado tearing a city apart and flood waters approaching. The child leaps to a tree branch as the waters overtake her and she screams. It is then that she wakes from what is only a dream and decides to make a home video saying, “Please help the world.”
Will the bickering and myopic leaders of the world heed this call? We shall know in the next few days.
Meanwhile, here are the credits for this film:
Director: Mikkel Blaabjerg Poulsen
Producers: Stefan Fjeldmark and Marie Peuliche
Cinematographer: Dan Laustsen
Production designer: Peter de Neergaard
Editor: Morten Giese
Composer: Davide Rossi
Sound design: Carl Plesner
Production company: Zentropa RamBuk
Advisory consultants: Mogens Holbøll, Bysted A/S and Christian Søndergaard, Attention Film ApS.
Mekong River flows through 6 countries, nurturing 65 million Asians The Mekong is one of Asia’s major rivers, and the twelfth longest in the world. Sometimes called the ‘Danube of the East’, it nurtures a great deal of life in its waters – and in the wetlands, forests, towns and villages along its path.
The Mekong’s long journey begins in the Tibetan highlands. It flows through China’s Yunan province, and then across Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia…before entering the sea from southern Vietnam. It’s a journey of nearly 5,000 kilometres, or some 3,000 miles.
The Mekong River Basin is the land surrounding all the streams and rivers that flow into it. This covers a vast area roughly the size of France and Germany combined.
On its long journey across 6 countries, the Mekong provides a life-line to over 65 million people. They share Mekong waters for drinking, farming, fishing and industry. Along the way, the river also generates electricity for South East Asia’s emerging economies.
Naturally, these teeming millions who share the river feel differently about how best to manage the river waters in their best interests. The Mekong River Commission (MRC) tries to nurture cooperation among the Mekong river countries, but differences still remain.
Some of these surfaced during the Mekong Media Forum being held in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai from 9 to 12 December 2009. As IPS reporter Marwaan Macan-Markar reported, “A heated debate about the future of the Mekong River at a media conference in this northern Thai city exposed a fault line triggered by the regional giant China’s plans to build a cascade of dams on the upper stretches of South-east Asia’s largest waterway.”
At the centre of this debate was Pipope Panitchpakdi, my Thai film-maker friend who recently made the documentary Mekong: The Untamed. He is both an outstanding journalist and an outspoken media activist.
He told the Forum: “The most important issue for people who live along the banks (of the lower stretches) of the Mekong are the dams and how these affect them. They cannot see the river as a pretty sight.”
Mekong: The Untamed chronicles the journey of Suthichai Yoon, a leading Thai media personality, from the headwaters of the Mekong River in Tibet to the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. The question he seeks to answer through his travels is how the planned Chinese dams affect communities who live along the banks of the river.
“My Mekong journey goes to the heart of Asia’s complexities,” says the narrator as he makes his way from China’s southern province of Yunnan to the north-eastern Thai town of Chiang Khong. The scenes he passes range from the raging waters of the Mekong and hills swathed with mist to riverside communities being torn apart by a building frenzy. “I wonder if the Chinese realise what the people who are impacted by the dam feel?” Suthichai asks at one point.
According to Pipope, another documentary film about the Mekong made by Chinese filmmakers overlooks some serious issues: “There was nothing about a lot of villages disappearing, that there are floods and the doubts people have about the Chinese dams.”
This second film, also showcased at the Mekong Media Forum, is a 20-episode series titled Nourished by the Same River, and has been made by China Central Television (CCTV).
A Chinese journalist on the panel conceded that the planned development targeting the Mekong would provoke a range of responses. “It is natural that different people will have different perspectives on similar issues,” said Zhu Yan, a senior editor at the national broadcaster China Central Television. “In China there is a debate (around the question) of environment or dams.”
The Mekong is both a mighty river and a massive bundle of issues for any film or film series to tackle. And given the multitude of countries, interests and viewpoints involved, it’s unlikely that there will be consensus.
But it’s good that films are sparking off discussion and debate…just what we need for more informed choices to be made in the future.
Some 225 participants, the bulk of them journalists from Mekong countries, are set to discuss, are debating and taking stock of their media environment against a backdrop of changing and often quite different news cultures at the Mekong Media Forum, being held in Chiang Mai from 9 to 12 December 2009.
I very much wanted to be there, for I’ve been covering the Mekong region as a journalist for 20 years, beginning with my first location filming visit to southern Vietnam in 1990. I’ve visited and worked in five of the six Mekong countries – Cambodia, China, Lao PDR, Thailand and Vietnam – with the exception of Burma.
But I’m missing this interesting event due to scheduling difficulties – I must try harder on my omnipresence act in the coming year…
The four-day media conference brings together a mix of participants, from print, television journalists and photojournalists to civil society, academics and developments, who will be discussing a menu of issues such as changes in the Mekong media scene, new trends, citizen journalism and new media, training, media challenges and reporting on water governance, children, as well as gender and sexuality.
Cinema Mekong, a strand within the forum, features the work of documentary filmmakers and video journalists who have been part of the Imaging Our Mekong Media Fellowship since 2002 — making this unique series of films very much from the lens of local filmmakers — as well as other films that focus on the Mekong region.
The Mekong Media Forum is being organised by IPS Asia-Pacific news agency and Probe Media Foundation, Inc., which since 2002 have been running the Imaging Our Mekong media fellowships. More than 220 journalists from the region have been fellows in this programme.
L to R - Darryl D'Monte, Dilrukshi Handunnetti, Nalaka Gunawardene Who’s afraid of Pee and Poop?
That’s the innocent but slightly provocative question I posed to a South Asian Conclave on sanitation that I addressed today at the Colombo Hilton.
My audience was a group of South Asians – drawn mainly from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – working in government, mainstream media or development agencies, all sharing an interest in water supply and sanitation (wat-san) issues.
I was asked to speak about Telling the Sanitation Story using Moving Images. But after listening to the fairly staid and often technocratic discussions preceding my presentation, I changed it. In doing so, I said that especially in broadcast television, the window of opportunity to attract the viewer is a tight one – it used to be 45 seconds, but these days more likely 30 seconds.
Sanitation is both an issue that is both urgent and important. As I noted on World Toilet Day marked on 19 Nov 2009, 2.5 billion people do not have somewhere safe, private or hygienic to go to the toilet.
And as C. Ajith Kumar of the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) – convenors of the Conclave – reminded us at the outset, South Asia is where most of these people live. Lacking any alternative, more than a billion (yes, 1,000 million) South Asians defecate in the open on a daily basis.
That’s a lot of poop, folks — and it’s completely untreated, uncovered and responsible for too many preventable illnesses and deaths.
Despite this dire emergency at individual and society levels, officials and activists concerned with wat-san issues continue to tip-toe around this poop. Or so it seemed to me — after two days, not once had the words poop or shit been mentioned in discussions. Instead, everyone was using the more politically correct terms such as faeces, excreta and excrement.
“Most of those billion people pooping in the open are not going to understand the lofty terms used in the charmed development circle,” I said. “You’ve got to talk in a language that ordinary, real people can and will understand – that’s the first step in effective communication.”
South Asian Conclave on Sanitation in Colombo, 8 Dec 2009The meeting had already acknowledged that improving sanitation involved a lot more than providing running water or building toilets. The development experience in the past three decade shows that infrastructure alone does not, automatically, lead to better sanitation. The biggest challenge remains in promoting hygienic practices among all – and that requires behaviour change, a slow and gradual process in any society.
I reminded everyone that when it comes to sanitation, the command-and-control approach that our South Asian governments are so used to adopting just won’t work. There are at least three aspects of life where choices and conduct are strictly personal: what happens in the bed room, bath room (toilet) and the shrine room.
As I summed it up in these words that I asked my audience to reflect on: Governments don’t defecate; people do.
“Please remember this if you really want to reach out and engage ordinary people who are living, breathing and pooping everyday in the real, harsh world.”
More of my presentation will be shared on this blog in the coming days.
Given the surfeit of media stories on climate in the build-up to the Copenhagen climate conference (7-18 Dec 2009), it would appear that journalists have little or no difficulty in covering this literally hot topic, right?
Wrong. The planet is warming, but not all editors and other media gate-keepers have yet warmed up to the topic. (We might even say: some are thawing more slowly than glaciers these days!).
“While environment is fast becoming a trendy topic, environmental journalists say they are finding it increasingly difficult to sell their stories to editors. This is a confounding trend in the news media, given the increasing confusion – and resultant calls for clarity – about scientific data for climate change in the run up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. The experts, however, say the trick is to repackage the story alluringly.”
Zofeen T EbrahimThis is the thrust of an article just written by the experienced Pakistani journalist and blogger Zofeen T. Ebrahim on Dawn.com. In Little strokes make big pictures, she probes the challenges that South Asian journalists continue to face in reporting and analysing on climate change in their mainstream media.
Zofeen, who was with me at the recent IFEJ congress in New Delhi a few weeks ago, quotes me in her article: “Nalaka Gunawardene, a senior award-winning science writer from Sri Lanka, recalls that his mentor, Tarzie Vittachi, once advised that ‘ordinary people live and work in the day-to -day weather. Most can’t relate to long-term climate. It’s our job, as journalists, to make those links clear.’ Of course, three decades ago, well before climate change was a hot topic, Vittachi was speaking metaphorically. But the words have great import today.”
She also quotes South Asian colleagues like Kunda Dixit, Joydeep Gupta, Nirmal Ghosh and Aroosa Masroor Khan (all men, although they are among the finest in the profession :)).
Her conclusion: environmental stories may still be a hard sell in many media outlets, but committed journalists have found ways to market their stories first within their organisations, and then to their respective audiences. That is some good news as the crucial climate talks open in the cool climes of Copenhagen.
Zofeen T. Ebrahim is a Karachi-based independent journalist and has been writing for IPS since April 2003. She also writes for Women’s Feature Service, IRIN and Indo Asian News Service. The stories she has covered include human rights, specially pertaining to women and children, health and how development impacts environment.
Today, 7 December 2009, the latest UN-FCCC climate negotiations begin in Copenhagen, Denmark. It’s not just another environmental conference – this one can make or break the future of our world.
Recognising this, 56 newspapers from 45 countries across the world have up with common editorial and demanded that world leaders put aside their differences and step up to seal the deal. The text was drafted by a Guardian team during more than a month of consultations with editors from more than 20 of the papers involved. Like the Guardian most of the newspapers have taken the unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front page.
At Moving Images, we add our own modest echo to this call by reproducing the editorial in full, as is:
One World, One Climate, One Editorial...
Copenhagen climate change conference: ‘Fourteen days to seal history’s judgment on this generation’
This editorial calling for action from world leaders on climate change is published today by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages.
Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.
Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.
Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.
The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.
Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.
But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June’s UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: “We can go into extra time but we can’t afford a replay.”
At the deal’s heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.
Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.
Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world’s biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.
Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of “exported emissions” so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than “old Europe”, must not suffer more than their richer partners.
The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.
Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.
But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.
Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.
Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”.
It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.
The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.
Dr Wijaya Godakumbura holding his invention - Photo courtesy Rolex Awards/Tomas Bertelsen
It’s easy to curse the darkness, and many among us regularly do. Only a few actually try to light even a small candle to fight it. Dr Wijaya Godakumbura of Sri Lanka is one of them – he literally lights lamps, thousands of them, against the darkness of ignorance and poverty.
But his lamps are different, and a great deal safer compared to normal lamps and kerosene, which can start fires risking life and property of users. The design is simple yet effective, inspired in part by the Marmite bottle known the world over: it’s small and squat, with two flat sides – equipped with a safe metal screw cap to hold the wick. It’s quite stable and hard to topple.
Surgeon turned inventor and social activist, Dr Godakumbura founded and runs the Safe Bottle Lamp Foundation which distributes safe, virtually unbreakable kerosene lamps to those who can’t afford electricity. For these untiring efforts that have saved hundreds of lives, the good doctor and his organisation have just been selected the overall global winner in the 5th annual World Challenge awards conducted jointly by BBC World News and Newsweek, together with Shell.
The Safe Bottle Lamp Foundation received a $20,000 grant from Shell to invest in the future of the project. The winner and runners-up were felicitated at an awards ceremony in the City of The Hague on 1 December 2009.
Now in its fifth year, World Challenge 2009 is a global competition aimed at finding projects or small businesses from around the world that have shown enterprise and innovation at a grass roots level. World Challenge is brought to you by BBC World News and Newsweek, in association with Shell, and is about championing and rewarding projects and business which really make a difference.
A record breaking 900 plus nominations were received this year and from these, twelve finalists were chosen by a panel of expert judges. BBC World News viewers and Newsweek readers then selected their favourite from these dozen unique and inspiring entries by casting more than 127,800 votes at http://www.theworldchallenge.co.uk.
Watch short film featuring the Safe Bottle Lamp when it emerged a finalist this year:
BBC/Shell World Challenge series producer is my former colleague Robert Lamb, who has blazed many new trails in broadcast television and development communication. He specialises in telling complex environmental stories in engaging terms using moving images, and now runs his own independent film production company One Planet Pictures in the UK.
At the beginning of the World Challenge 2009 process, Robert wrote in the producer’s blog: “World Challenge is now in its fifth year. Over that time we have received thousands of nominations. Sadly, we have only been able to film a small selection. But it’s enough to know that there are millions of points of light out there. Watching the news is easy to forget that the vast majority of people go about their lives peacefully and productively.
“Our aim In World Challenge is briefly to bring stories of modest scale sustainable enterprise to the screens. Every year has thrown up big surprises. The diverse ways that ordinary people go about making a living without taxing the Earth’s resources is uplifting. This year we feature the most diverse crop of stories yet…And the really good news is that they are still going strong and proving that ‘sustainable’ is a term with a lot of meaning.”
Say eeeeeeeeeee - and don't ask questions!The much-hyped e-Asia 2009 conference and exhibition opens in Colombo, Sri Lanka, today. It is organised by our good friends at the Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies (CSDMS) in India and the Sri Lankan government agency known as Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA).
According to the conference website, e-Asia 2009 is meant also to celebrate Sri Lanka’s Year of ICT and English, 2009. The event has been preceded by a massive advertising blitz in Sri Lanka’s print and broadcast media, while Colombo and suburbs have been plastered with promotional banners and posters.
The foreign delegates will be exposed to a great deal of sunshine stories from the ICTA which was originally set up as a sunset agency (but hey, the sun never sets on some people!). Sri Lankan delegates will be too embarrassed or well mannered to point out glaring gaps between the hype and reality. Few people want to rock the boat these days!
I am reminded of a popular Sri Lankan folk tale. It relates an incident that happened when we were ruled by hereditary kings, and concerns jaggery — a delicious sugar substitute we make from the sap of the coconut palm.
The King of Lanka, being the curious type, wanted to know how jaggery was made. He sent for the official jaggery supplier to the Palace, who claimed that it was being produced under the most hygienic conditions by people who had mastered the technique for decades.
Unlike today’s rulers, however, the kings of yore didn’t believe everything they were told. So one day the King went in disguise to investigate. Which was just as well — because the reality was completely different! The king found his jaggery being made in a rickety old shack, with none of the hygienic conditions!
A very angry king revealed who he was, and demanded an explanation. He was then told: “That’s the hype, Your Majesty, and this is the reality!”
For one thing, today’s heads of state – overexposed in the media – can hardly expect to go anywhere incognito (and if they tried, security officers and assorted sycophants would immediately prevent it!). All the same, it is an interesting thought experiment to wonder what the President of Sri Lanka might uncover if he were to probe beyond the glitzy (almost giddy) propaganda being unleashed by ICTA!
As I wrote in CSDMS’s own regional magazine i4d a couple of years ago, the gulf between the hype and reality in our ICT circles can be as wide as it is shocking. When an agency invests so much time, effort and money in publicity, we can always suspect that there is more than what meets the eye…
People want their needs met and problems solved, not fancy projects...
The proof of the ICT pudding is in the societal acceptance and integration of ICT tools, processes and services in the daily living, work and leisure of people. As I said in my i4d essay: “Tragically, the ICT Agency of Sri Lanka, which has the mandate and powers to address these issues, is instead dissipating its energy and resources on setting up rural tele-centres, a task that it should leave to better positioned and experienced groups. This glaring inability to set and pursue the right priorities has been a bane of Sri Lankan ICT sector for years.”
What I wrote a couple of years ago is still valid. Here’s another excerpt:
No amount of legislation, policy formulation and paid propaganda by the ICTA is going to mainstream ICTs in Sri Lankan society. ICTs have to prove their worth, and be accepted as adding value to living and working conditions of ordinary people.
We can assess the utility and relevance of any new technology by asking a few simple questions. Does the new technology or process:
– put more food on their table?
– add More money in people’s pockets?
– make interfacing with govt easier?
– save time and effort involved in commuting?
– support cultural and personal needs of individuals and groups?
– put a smile on users’ faces?
Finally, is it affordable, user-friendly and widely available, with minimum entry level barriers?
I’ve also argued that, when it comes to commenting on our topsy-turvy times, no one can beat cartoonists for their economy of words. They offer us popular social philosophy that is piercing, witty and hilarious – all in an amazingly tiny space.
The British Council and the Ken Sprague Fund of UK are currently running a cartoon contest on climate change open to Sri Lankan citizens from 18 to 35 years. They offer attractive prizes for those who can be seriously funny about this global crisis. The award winning and commended entries are to be exhibited in Colombo and Kandy in March 2010.
The deadline for submitting entries is 7 December 2009. More details here.
Declaration of interest: As a long time admirer of cartoons, I have agreed to be on the national selection panel.
Fair enough – there isn’t one right way to handle such public sharing, and each film maker does it differently. I know some who simply want to be there from beginning to end, derive great satisfaction from being acknowledged upfront, and are eager to engage the audience after the screening (I’m one of this type). A few prefer to sit quietly and unrecognised amidst the viewers, observing candid reactions of the audience, and may (or may not) own up in the end. Then there are those who leave the room.
Open Minds! 