Nalaka Gunawardene

Wanted: Ethical sourcing of international TV news

In recent years, consumer pressure has built up against products made using child labour and blood diamonds. If these are no longer internationally acceptable, neither should the world tolerate moving images whose origins are ethically suspect.

This is a point I have been making for sometime. I feel very strongly about it, because to me, what goes on behind the cameras is as important as what is in front of the cameras — and is therefore seen by millions of television viewers.

Many media researchers and media-watchers don’t pay enough attention to this aspect. Volumes of content analysis are produced on what is broadcast, but do we probe how that content gets on the air in the first place?

My recent blog post, and international op ed essay, on cheque-book development corrupting the broadcast media reiterates this point.

When Al Jazeeera launched its English language international news and current affairs channel in November 2006, I wrote an op ed essay called ‘Ethical Newsgathering: Al Jazeera’s Biggest Challenge’. This was published by media-watch websites on both sides of the Atlantic: MediaChannel.org managed from New York, USA, and MediaHelpingMedia managed from London, UK.

I looked at the track record of the two leading international news channels, BBC World and CNN International, and noted:

“They have increasingly come to epitomise a disturbing trend in international news and current affairs journalism: the end justifies the means.

“Take, for example, a major news story that broke in my part of the world two years ago: the Asian Tsunami of December 2004.

“In a few dreadful hours, the disaster killed, injured or otherwise shattered the lives of millions. The ‘media tsunami’ that followed added insult to injury by turning the plight of affected people into a global circus. The right to privacy and dignity of thousands of affected people was repeatedly violated. The visual media, in particular, had no qualms about showing the dead, injured and orphaned: the story was gory.

“One CNN reporter later wrote a whole book recounting those few momentous days, when his team apparently managed to get stories before anyone else. Seemingly because they threw more money, equipment and diplomatic clout than others. The ‘gung-ho’ tone in that book is revolting yet revealing.

“Such journalists’ only operating guideline seems to be: get the story, no matter what — or who gets hurt in that process.”

Read the essay: Ethical Newsgathering: Al Jazeera’s Biggest Challenge, by Nalaka Gunawardene, on MediaChannel.org

Read an earlier essay, Communication Rights and Communication Wrongs, by Nalaka Gunawardene, on SciDev.Net

In the corporate media world, we the viewers are ‘consumers’ of what the multiple news channels peddle 24/7. Few of us see beyond what comes up on our screens, and even fewer bother about how those images are sourced.

If we want ethical sourcing of TV news content, that pressure must come from us, the consumers. We should react not only to the carefully packaged moving images and soundbytes dished out to us, but also demand to know if these have been acquired in an ethically acceptable manner.

Good journalism is not just a mix of accuracy, balance and credibility (the A, B and C we are taught in journalism school). There is also D (Discernment) and E (Ethical sourcing).

– Nalaka Gunawardene

Memories of Toyama: Japan Wildlife Film Festival

Image courtesy JWFF

The Japan Wildlife Film Festival opens today – 23 August 2007 – in Toyama, in eastern Japan.

As their website says: “Established in 1993, the Festival is held biennially. It started in the hope that by screening moving images of the wonders of wildlife and the co-existence of nature and people, we could help to increase understanding and awareness of the urgent need to protect and care for the natural world.”

The last Festival, in August 2005, received 331 film entries from 35 countries and some 30,000 people, including many school children, attended the public screenings staged throughout the Toyama region. This level of public participation is exceptional for an international film festival — and shows how well the organisers, the Nature Film Network, have engaged the local people.

International film-makers and broadcasters now know the Festival as one of the biggest of its kind in Asia.

I’m missing Toyama this year. I participated in the last two festivals and have fond memories — of watching great films, having excellent company and enjoying outstanding Japanese hospitality in the salubrious holiday city of Toyama.

In 2003, I was part of the festival’s international jury. Then at the 2005 festival, I was invited to give a talk about our Children of Tsunami media project, which at the time was documenting the personal recovery stories of eight families affected by the Asian Tsunami in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

In both years, a highlight of my experience was the opening evening reception, held at a traditional Japanese farm house restored by NFN and located a half-hour’s drive outside the city. There, the local people hosted us to food and beverages prepared at home. An evening of simple, unpretentious cultural exchange — with nothing ‘official’ about it!

That’s the character of NFN chairman Hirohisa Ota: a man of few words who leads by example and brings together a small but dynamic team of staff and volunteers to run the 4-day festival with clockwork precision.

The photo below shows international participants at JWFF 2005.

Photo from JWFF website

List of finalist films competing in JWFF 2007

Read my earlier post on Toyama 2005: Lawyers who locked up the Butterfly Tree

Rajiv Kafle: A ‘Portrait of Commitment’ against HIV

It was good to see Rajiv Kafle again — even if only in this photograph, where he is the grown up surrounded by children. This was taken by my friend Shahidul Alam, whose latest photo exhibition, Portraits of Commitment, I’ve just seen.

I immediately recognised Rajiv because he was a key character in a documentary film we at TVE Asia Pacific commissioned five years ago, in 2002. Love for a Longer Life, directed by Nepali film-maker Dhurba Basnet, was part of a package of Truth Talking films that probed how Asia Pacific societies were coping with rapid change or crises.

At that time, there were 50,000 Nepalis living with HIV. But Rajiv was the very first among them to publicly announce that he had HIV — it created ripples in the conservative Nepali society.

He is a former injecting drug user who contracted HIV through unsafe needles.

“I injected drugs for two years. I got infected with HIV when I used a contaminated syringe belonging to one of my friends. He was HIV positive and I used his syringe without sterilising it properly,” Rajiv described his case history on our film.

After coming to terms with his own HIV status, Rajiv turned activist. For the past few years, he has been a crusader to educate Nepalese youth to prevent them from contracting HIV through ignorance. He gives talks at schools and colleges about his experiences of living with HIV.

It has not been easy: his revelation shook the conservative Nepali society, where most people are still reluctant to talk about HIV, associating it directly with illicit sex.

“Stigma, discrimination — then death.” That’s the bleak future that many HIV positive people in Nepal face according to Rajiv. “There is a great deal of stigma and discrimination against HIV/AIDS sufferers. Because there is so much negative publicity, an HIV-positive person finds it difficult to reveal his condition. He will have heard only about stigma, discrimination and death.”

“If we create a favourable environment, people will definitely come out and let others know,” he says, adding: “It took me a couple of years before I was able to publicly announce that I was HIV positive.”

Change was happening even five years ago when the camera crew from Nepal Forum of Environmental Journalists (NEFEJ) followed him across Kathmandul Valley as he gave talks at schools and other public places.

“Now I see a change. Lots of young people understand the problem and are getting involved. The media and public are now more interested in this subject and they want to interact with people who have been through this.”

It wasn’t easy to produce Love for a Longer Life. As Dhurba Basnet (photo, above) reported at the time: “The major problem we faced during shooting, however, was that it was very difficult to get people living with HIV to talk naturally on camera. We had to first win their trust. This we achieved by behaving with them as normally as possible.”

After some shooting had been completed, Rajiv Kafle fell ill. “Since he was a major character in the film we had to wait a whole month while he recovered.”

Shahidul Alam’s blog post on Portraits of Commitment photo exhibition featuring individuals making a difference in South Asia’s battle against HIV

Read my earlier blog post on HIV in Nepal: Ratomate’s best cup of tea (29 March 2007)

Rajiv Kafle photo by Shahidul Alam, Drik/Majority World

HIV/AIDS as a growth industry?

The 8th International Conference on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific, or ICAAP8, is currently being held in my home city Colombo, Sri Lanka, and runs from 19 to 23 August 2007.

As I wrote earlier, some of us who have a track record of communicating on HIV/AIDS have been excluded from this conference by the arrogance of its organisers. And having just read the biography of Sri Lanka’s best known HIV/AIDS activist, I now understand why.

Good books help us experience a range of emotions. A Life in the Round: Desamanya Kamalika, The Girl from Giruwa Pattuwa by Hilary Abeyaratne (WHT Publications, Colombo, 2006) made me outraged and deeply ashamed of the kind of sick society I live in.

Here are some depressing ‘lowlights’ from the book:
* Some medical professionals and para-medics simply refused to treat one of their own kind who was accidentally infected with HIV (fearing infection from casual contact!).
* A leading government hospital carelessly stocked and peddled blood contaminated with HIV. When discovered, it was quickly covered up, and the official investigation was suppressed.
* Some NGOs and charities have turned HIV activism into a self-serving, lucrative industry. There are fierce ‘turf wars’ to claim persons living with HIV as their institutional ‘property’.
* The public health system mandated to care for those living with HIV reinforces stigma and discrimination against such persons.

Image courtesy YouandAIDS

That’s just for starters. The book packs more shocking details on mass-scale ignorance about basic facts, bureaucratic apathy and a nation in staunch denial about the human immunodeficiency virus.

And we understand why the merchants of misery detested Dr Mrs Kamalika Abeyaratne, who stood up and spoke out for the rights of those living with HIV in Sri Lanka.

She was an extraordinary Sri Lankan woman and a dedicated physician, and the book is her life’s story told by her family and friends. As the cover blurb says: “This is a sad but inspiring account of the joys, sorrows, achievements and disappointments in an all-too-brief but beautiful life, cut short by tragedy and a courageous battle with HIV.”

In 1994, Dr Kamalika was involved in a serious road accident while heading to a rural location where she was to conduct a free medical clinic. While being treated at a government hospital, she was administered HIV-contaminated blood. Media investigations later revealed how intravenous drug users had routinely sold their blood to this hospital, which had few checks in place. This created a major scandal in the public health system — ironically, the very system that she had served for many years.

Dr Kamalika (Kami to her friends) was one of the very few Sri Lankans who openly acknowledged their HIV status. She paid a dear price for this admission: she was shunned and maligned by many members of her own medical community. Undaunted, she spent the last few years of life as an activist campaigning for the rights of persons living with HIV. She waged an almost lone battle for access to anti retroviral (ARV) treatment.

As Sonam Yangchen Rana of UNDP’s Regional HIV and Devlopment Programme has noted: “As a champion for the rights of people living with HIV/AIDS, she had become an icon for PLWHA in the region. Spreading awareness about issues surrounding the epidemic had become the mission of her life. She campaigned vigorously against stigma and discrimination faced by people living with HIV/AIDS and exemplified that PLWHA can lead productive and meaningful lives. productive and meaningful lives.”

And here’s a revealing extract from her biography:
“Paediatrician turned activist, here is the story of Kami’s involvement in the HIV/AIDS campaign. A story that suggests rather wryly that it is not only about People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA), but also about those who have been called People Living off HIV/AIDS (PLOHA). Kami’s own statement on this issue was that the known number of both groups was about the same, with some of the latter, representing some non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or other, living in five-star hotels, driving around in Toyota Land Cruisers, and using up sixty percent of their resources on ‘administrative costs’.”

So now we know why some organisers of ICAAP8 were so defensive and protective of ‘their’ virus: after all, it is their horn of plenty that they cannot share with anyone else. These PLOHA are the mandarins of HIV/AIDS, Incorporated.

On a personal note, I always admired Dr Kamalika but never got to meet her. Our paths almost crossed once in July 2000, when I had helped Panos South Asia to organise a media gatekeepers’ meeting on HIV which she addressed. But the night before, I was struck down by influenza, and didn’t get to participate in what had been a stimulating meeting.

Read Dr Kamalika Abeyaratne: A Profile of Courage, written by my friend Manori Wijesekera in 2003:
dr-kamalika-abeyratne-by-manori-wijesekera.pdf

Read InterPress Service profile on Dr Kamalika Abeyaratne

The Sunday Times (Sri Lanka) review of Kamalika Abeyaratne biography (March 2007)

Read The Sunday Times (Sri Lanka) tribute to Dr Kamalika Abeyaratne, 19 June 2005

Read journalistic coverage of ICAAP8 by Inter Press Service:

Making fun of HIV: Welcome to the Scenarios from Africa

General Assembly of Diseases: In the city of Contaminobo, assorted germs in an emergency session. Tuberculosis, Polio, Hepatitis and others are all angry and afraid because their favourite target – humans – are fighting back. Enter ‘His Royal Heinous, Overlord AIDS’. Hope at last! When he attacks the immune system of humans, other germs can still have a chance…The humans are so careless, that it’s easy for AIDS to quickly spread from one to many. But wait a minute – somebody has been listening into all their talk. Which means the secret of defending humans from HIV and his cronies is out.

Iron Will: Moussah is a young man with a healthy, or bubbling, interest in girls. His male friends advise him to be play it safe — carefree sex can easily expose him to HIV, for which there is no cure. They talk about condoms, and another strategy that is an alternative to using the rubber latex. But Moussah doesn’t quite understand the expression ‘iron will’. He interprets it differently, and gets custom made iron underpants made — much to the amusement of his friends, who remind him the most important sex organ is…the brain!

Just Once: A man returns from the field and feels like making love to his wife. She is living with HIV and insists that he uses a condom — but they’ve run out of stocks. So he cycles far and wide in search of condoms – where is a rubber when you need one? Finally he succeeds and rushes home, only to find that his wife did have one last, unused condom with her. So why didn’t you tell me, he asks in exasperation. Her answer is revealing….

Intrigued? There’s a lot more where they came from.

These three stories are part of Scenarios from Africa — a highly successful and popular pan-African initiative to use moving images to get young people talking and acting on HIV/AIDS. The decade-long project has been carried out with and for young people, with community mobilisation, education and media elements.

Integral to this communication effort are television drama vignettes about different scenarios involving HIV in everyday life.

Some are very funny while others are very moving. They cover many dimensions of the HIV epidemic, from preventing the virus spreading to taking care of persons living with HIV. Underlying themes include safe sex, removing social stigma from the epidemic and dispelling misconceptions about how HIV spreads or does not spread.

The project was started in 1997 and is coordinated by the non-profit Global Dialogues Trust. It gave African children and young adults an exciting opportunity to educate themselves and others about HIV/AIDS by inviting them to participate with internationally acclaimed directors in the production of these short films.

The films are based on ideas thought up by young people in a series of contests. So far, over 105,000 young people from 37 African countries have taken part in these contests. Over 1,000 local and international partner organisations have been involved in organising the contests and selecting the winning ideas.

The films range in duration from just under 2 minutes to almost 15 minutes. They were produced by top fiction film-makers and animation specialists in Africa.

All stories use African actors, locations and situations – and employ different story telling tactics.

Scenarios from Africa is a multi-media communication project that has been widely acclaimed by practitioners, activists and scholars worldwide. The films are supported by a user’s guide and online discussion points that help teachers, trainers and activists to make the best use of these stories in their work.

The films are all distributed on a non-commercial basis across Africa and beyond, for broadcast and narrowcast use. The Scenarios films have been broadcast on locally-based television stations in almost every country in sub-Saharan Africa. The films are also collected on compilation DVDs and video cassettes for use by organisations and schools. Some 60,000 copies of the films (DVDs and video cassettes) of the films have been distributed to date.

The films are now available in a wide and growing range of African and European languages, and are reaching tens of millions of people.

Says Daniel Enger of the Global Dialogues Trust: “Although the films were originally produced for the sub-Saharan African cultural context, we have been pleased to learn over the years that the films have proven useful as awareness-raising tools in many countries of the Asia Pacific area. Indeed, most of the HIV-related topics raised in the Scenarios from Africa collections have universal relevance, making the films useful discussion starters across the globe.”

TVE Asia Pacific has recently taken on the task of distributing all Scenarios films across the Asia Pacific region. As with all other films in its catalogue, TVEAP will distribute Scenarios on a non-exclusive, non-commercial basis to broadcast, civil society and educational. We have been promoting the Scenarios films since we screened them to packed houses during the 2004 AIDS Film Festival in Bangkok

Meanwhile, the 5th Scenarios contest will be held from 1 December 2007 to 15 March 2008. Please contact for more information.

Watch Scenarios films on the official website (RealPlayer required)

Scenarios from Africa now available from TVE Asia Pacific

All images used in this post are courtesy Global Dialogues Trust.

Read my other blog posts on HIV:
HIV: Stigma a bigger killer than the virus?
Three Amigos: Funny condoms with a serious mission
Beware of Vatican condoms!
50? In South African terms, you’re probably dead!
Ratomate’s best cup of tea
A girl named Nan-nan

‘Cheque-book Development’: Paying public media to deliver development agency logos

In their ceaseless efforts to keep their organisations in the media spotlight, spin doctors of development agencies are distorting news values and corrupting the media, turning issue-based communication products into ‘logo delivery mechanisms’.

This is the thrust of my latest op ed essay, titled ‘Cheque-book Development’ corrupting the media. It has just published by the popular media-watch website anchored in the US, MediaChannel.org

Image courtesy MediaChannel.org

In this essay, I draw on several years of first hand observations in development, humanitarian and broadcasting circles at Asian and global levels. I focus on a disturbing practice that more and more development/humanitarian agencies engage in: paying intermediaries for getting their stories on global news and current affairs TV channels.

This is nothing short of cash-for-media coverage.

Here’s an extract:

“As development organisations compete more intensely for external funding, they are increasingly adopting desperate strategies to gain higher media visibility for their names, logos and bosses.

“Communication officers in some leading development and humanitarian organisations have been reduced to publicists. When certain UN agency chiefs tour disaster or conflict zones, their spin doctors precede or follow them. Some top honchos now travel with their own ’embedded journalists’ – all at agency expense.

“In this publicity frenzy, these agencies’ communication products are less and less on the issues they stand for or reforms they passionately advocate. Instead, the printed material, online offerings and video films have become ‘logo delivery mechanisms’.”

Image courtesy MediaChannel.org Cartoon courtesy Global Journalist

Some of these communication officers I write about have become friends over the years — I empathise with their pressures, but don’t approve of what their organistions do. As I write in the essay:

“This practice is wrong on two counts. One, allowing intermediaries to sell access to the airwaves is a form of corruption. Two, every time this happens, it siphons off tax-payer supported development funds intended for combating poverty and suffering in the majority world.

“It is the reverse of cheque-book journalism, where some media organisations pay celebrity or other sources for exclusive access to their stories. When development agencies are paying sections of the media to get promotional or favourable stories aired, we must call it ‘cheque-book development’.”

Make no mistake — this is a form of media corruption. It’s not just the development sector’s vanity that fuels this process. Many 24/7 news channels are struggling to fill their hours inexpensively. Some turn a blind eye to ethical sourcing as long as they can have a steady supply of subsidised content.

Read my full essay on MediaChannel.org

Note: Being a US-anchored outlet, MediaChannel.org spells ‘cheque-book’ as ‘check-book’, which is correct in American spelling of English! As I write in my essay, it appears that TV channels and networks on that side of the Atlantic seem a bit harder to corrupt. But then, what do I know?

Read my Nov 2006 essay on MediaChannel.org: Ethical News Gathering Challenge for Al Jazeera

I have been speaking about the growing threat of cheque-book development for some time. For instance, I referred to it during Communicating Disasters: An Asian Brainstorming organised by TVE Asia Pacific and UNDP in Bangkok in December 2006.

Essay republished on Asia Media Forum

India and Pakistan: Still struggling to grow up at 60!

See 23 March 2008 related story: Arthur C Clarke – Of Nukes and Impotent Nations (commentary on nuclear arms race in South Asia)

Today, 15 August 2007, India marked its 60th anniversary of political independence from the British. Pakistan, which was created by the British partitioning of India at the time of independence, marked their 60th birthday yesterday.

So here’s wishing the Indo-Pak combine a meaningful 60th.

For human beings, 60 is a landmark age. In some cultures, it marks the beginning of senior citizen stage. Wisdom, maturity and exemplary conduct are assumed and expected of those reaching 60.

When it comes to nation states, however, things don’t quite work that way. India and Pakistan at 60 are a good example.

Yes, they have made significant advances on many fronts in the past six decades. But before that progress can be celebrated, we have to take note of the political and socio-economic turmoil that these two nations — harbouring close to 1.5 billion human beings between them — find themselves in.

Those tensions are exacerbated by the bitter nuclear arms race between these two still-impoverished nations.

When it comes to geopolitics of nuclear weapons, India and Pakistan behave worse than two sill school boys. This is how my friends at Himal Southasian magazine summed it up brilliantly:

And here’s another Himal cartoon which punctures the juvenile male obsession with weapons of mass destruction:

Image courtesy Himal Southasian

So let’s hope that the 60-year-olds will finally begin to act their age at least now!

AV against HIV: Recalling my own ‘Richard Gere moment’

The 8th International Conference on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific, or ICAAP8, opens in my home city of Colombo in a few days’ time. As I wrote in an earlier post, some of us have been blocked out of this important event by some arrogant members of the conference Secretariat. But our interest in HIV/AIDS advocacy will not be so easily deterred.

On a positive note, I have vivid memories of my active involvement in the XV International AIDS Conference, held in Bangkok, which attracted over 17,000 delegates to the Thai capital for a week full of events and activities. One of them was the official 2004 International AIDS Film Festival, which TVE Asia Pacific organised at the invitation of the Thai Ministry of Public Health and the International AIDS Society.

2004 AIDS Film Festival in Bangkok

Over 4 days, we screened close to 50 TV and video films at three venues, drawing a total of more than 8,000 visitors. These films came from all over the world, in response to an open call that we had issued. We received a rich mix of genres: documentaries, docu-drama, current affairs programming, short television spots as well as entertainment formats — animation, dramas and reality television.

Films at this festival captured the kaleidoscope of emotions, challenges and contradictions presented by the AIDS pandemic. They were evidence of how TV and film professionals are covering HIV as a major development concern of our times.

That formidable task — which we summed up as ‘AV against HIV’ — received a boost when movie industry heavyweights joined in. We had documentaries narrated by Angelina Jolie, Will Smith and Glenn Close.

And while we were organising the festival, actor-activist Richard Gere sent the word saying he was interested in being associated with it. Of course we seized the offer, and had him open the film festival — hugely raising its profile in the Thai and international media.

2004 AIDS Film Festival banner by TVEAP Richard Gere arrives for 2004 AIDS Film Festival, Bangkok Richard Gere being welcomed by Thai children

After three years, I can still remember the moving speech that Richard Gere made at the opening ceremony in the Scala cinema in downtown Bangkok. Talking to an audience packed with diplomats, businessmen, journalists, activists and government officials, he said his experience with persons living with HIV had changed his life even more than his study of Tibetan Buddhism.

He recalled how he had lost a very close friend to HIV. “I don’t want anyone else to die like that,” he said, adding: “It (AIDS) has gone on too long, way too long.”

Then he did something simple yet very effective. He asked everyone who knew at least one person living with HIV to put their hands up. A few dozen hands went up in an audience of around 500.

Next, he said: hands up everyone who has lost at least one person to HIV. Some hands went down while three dozen remained held up.

I did not put my hands up for either call.

That was a moment of truth for myself. Until then, I hadn’t really, closely known anyone who was living with HIV (and disclosed that fact to me). I also had not lost anyone to HIV. Not knowingly anyway.

As the event progressed, I sat there asking myself:
• What kind of little comfort zone or cocoon am I living in?
• What kind of society do I live in, where very few people – if anyone – would dare to acknowledge they are living with HIV?
• And how can I remain authentic, communicating HIV from such a detached standpoint?

Richard Gere at XVI AIDS Conference in Toronto, 2006

I’ve been writing and speaking about HIV for almost two decades. In that time, I have touched on many aspects of HIV, including:
• The science of HIV/AIDS, as a science communicator;
• Public health aspects of the global pandemic as a feature writer;
• The human rights dimensions of HIV, as a development communicator; and
• Nexus between media and HIV, as a media watcher/researcher.

But I sat there in the Scala cinema wondering if it was sufficient for me to have done all that with the objectivity of a journalist, or the clinical detachment of a researcher.

I then realised that when it comes to HIV/AIDS, we have to suspend these ordinary frameworks and ‘conditioning’ of our training.

We have to:
• Stop thinking of it as someone else’s problem;
• Get away from the ‘us’ and ‘them’ mindset;
• Understand that no one is immune or buffered from the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV; and
• More than anything else — stop living in denial.

These apply to individuals, communities, society — and also governments.

That was my Richard Gere moment.

Read TVEAP news report on 2004 AiDS Film Festival

See more photos on 2004 AIDS Film Festival on TVEAP website

Photos by Jerome Ming and Indika Wanniarachchi for TVEAP

“If we don’t tell our stories, no one else will”

Image courtesy Maisha Labs

An unpretentious, matter-of-fact press release arrived in my email overnight from Maisha Film Lab in Kampala, Uganda. It started as follows:

“MAISHA, the annual training program for East African Filmmakers founded by director Mira Nair (Namesake, Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding) is now in its third year of operation. Housed in Munyonyo, Kampala, the three-week lab (which takes place from July 21st to August 11th, 2007) is currently training 9 filmmakers, 3 sound mixers, 3 cinematographers, and 3 editors with world-renowned filmmaking professionals.”

The press release then listed Maisha’s 2007 mentors. Among them:
– Jason Filardi (Writer, Bringing Down The House)
– Joshua Marston (Writer/Director, Maria Full of Grace)
– Alison Maclean (Writer/Director, Jesus’ Son)
– David Keating (Writer/Director, Last of the High Kings)
– Drew Kunin (Production Sound Mixer, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Zodiac)
– Kerwin DeVonish (2nd Unit DP, Inside Man)
– Barry Alexander Brown (Editor, Inside Man, Malcolm X), and
– Fellipe Barbosa (Director, Salt Kiss)

Wow – Mira has succeeded in rounding up some of the best film industry talent in North America. All these professionals are donating their time, so that African film-makers can sharpen their skills in making better moving images.

But it’s the mission of Maisha that interests me most — because it so resonates with what we at TVE Asia Pacific have been advocating in Asia in our own small way: equipping and empowering local film-makers to tell their own stories to their people and the world.

Maisha’s tagline says it all: “If we don’t tell our stories, no one else will”

As their website explains: “Film is easily one of the most far-reaching mediums in the modern world, one that essentially validates a culture. In the entire African continent, there are few, if any, training programs for aspiring filmmakers.

“The few films that take place in East Africa are often made by foreigners without local crews, and generally focus on the political turmoil that plagues the region. While there is a flourishing and vital writing and theatre culture in the region, the bridge to convert this talent into screenplays and films has yet to be built.”

MAISHA (meaning “life” in Kiswahili) provides new screenwriters and film directors from East Africa (Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda) and South Asia (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh) with access to the professional training and production resources necessary to articulate their visions.

Mira Nair image from Harvard University Gazette

Maisha aims to preserve, cultivate and unleash local voices from these regions, and to become one of the first targeted programs to offer structured and accessible resources to these emerging filmmakers. MAISHA is motivated by the belief that a film which explores the truths and idiosyncrasies of the specifically local often has the power to cross over and become significantly universal.

Web 2.0 – The Machine is Us/ing Us!

Technology that drives the web is changing fast. Dozens of free or very low-cost interactive Web tools have emerged in recent years that enhance the ways we create and publish information and the ways we collaborate and share resources – text, images, audio and video.

This evolution of the Web is commonly known as Web 2.0. This term was first coined by the American media company O’Rieliy Media in 2003.

This blog you are reading is part of that web 2.0 evolution. So is YouTube!