Sam Gregory“It’s an immensely exciting time for people working with video. More and more people creating and using video, more places to share it, more ways to place it in front of people who can make a difference.
“It raises challenges too: saturation of images and compassion-fatigue, finding your place to be heard, and the safety and security and consent issues that arise when many more people are filming each other.
“But overall I think we’re seeing a really powerful moment for individual expression but also collective accountability being supported via image-making.”
So says Sam Gregory programme director of Witness, a human rights organisation which uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. The New York-anchored organisation works around the world to ’empower people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change’.
http://www.witness.orgSam recalls how he was once making films and also involved in activism, and ‘frustrated at how the two didn’t fit together’.
He adds: “In the traditional TV documentary world, the advocacy purpose of film was under-utilized. The fact that you got 500,000 viewers for a TV broadcast told you nothing about whether that turned into action. So I started looking for ways to really make the video fit as a tool for real advocacy and change-making, and came upon WITNESS.”
We at TVE Asia Pacific worked closely with Sam in 2002-2004, when we implemented a collaborative Asian regional project called Truth Talking where Witness was a partner. It was through Witness that I met courageous info activists like Joey R B Lozano.
In his long years of journalism in India, my friend Darryl D’Monte had faced all sorts of questions and situations. But this was one question that stunned and left him speechless for a while.
A visiting Canadian TV crew made this request in the 1970s, when Darryl was resident editor of The Times of
India. He was giving them some insights on the extent of poverty in his city of Bombay, since renamed as Mumbai. The crew had heard of the deliberate maiming of street children, before being employed as beggars. A disabled child would evoke more sympathy, increasing the daily collection for gangsters operating them from behind the scenes.
Darryl wasn’t willing to be associated with this ‘staging’. “Well, it’s going to happen anyway,” was the film crew’s cynical answer.
Now, fast forward 30 years to the present. At one point in the British-Indian movie Slumdog Millionaire, we see a young girl being blinded by a gangster who shelters and feeds a small army of children — all unleashed on Mumbai on a daily basis to tug at the heart strings of its teeming millions.
The film’s protagonist Jamal escapes the same fate by making a mad dash for freedom with his brother, Salim. But years later, they cross the gangster’s path again, with devastating results – for him.
Vikas Swarup: Look what I've started...Set and filmed in India, Slumdog Millionaire is the story of a young uneducated man from the slums of Mumbai who appears on the Indian TV’s version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (Kaun Banega Crorepati) and does so well to reach the final question that the game show host and the police suspect him of cheating.
Some Indians feel their country’s ugly underbelly has been magnified by locating and filming part of the story in the slums of Mumbai. But director Danny Boyle, who sees his film as a Dickensian tale, says he shot in real, gritty locations “to show the beauty and ugliness and sheer unpredictability” of the city.
Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup, who wrote the 2005 novel Q and A on which the movie is based, has a similar view. “This isn’t social critique,” he told The Guardian in an interview. “It’s a novel written by someone who uses what he finds to tell a story. I don’t have firsthand experience of betting on cricket or rape or murder. I don’t know if it’s true that there are beggar masters who blind children to make them more effective when they beg on the streets. It may be an urban myth, but it’s useful to my story.”
To me, Slumdog Millionaire feels like a cross between the acclaimed Brazilian slum movie City of God (Portuguese name: Cidade de Deus, 2002) and Quiz Show, the 1994 American historical drama film about TV quiz scandals in the 1950s.
City of God (2002) was filmed in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro
City of God is a Brazilian crime drama film directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, released in its home country in 2002 and worldwide in 2003. It was adapted by Bráulio Mantovani from the 1997 novel of the same name written by Paulo Lins.
The film’s depiction of narcotic drug rings, hold-ups, street violence and police corruption may not have been what the upper middle class Brazilians wanted to showcase to the rest of the world, but the film’s stark if grisly authenticity resonated with movie audiences around the world. Most of the actors were residents of favelas (slums) of Rio de Janeiro, such as Vidigal and the Cidade de Deus itself. City of God became one of the highest-grossing foreign films released in the United States up to that time.
The makers of Slumdog Millionaire adopted a similar approach. Its co-director Loveleen Tandan says she likes to get as close to reality as possible. This drove her to the slums of East Bandra to look for young children who resembled the protagonists in the story.
As she recalled in a recent interview with Tehelka: “I was very keen to get real slum kids, which is why I convinced them (producers) to do one-third of the scenes in Hindi. I made a scratch tape with real street kids. The team was surprised that Hindi actually made it brighter and more alive.”
Indeed, Slumdog doesn’t feel like a ‘foreign film’ despite it having a fair number of English subtitles, which only enhance the overall cinematic experience.
But how realistic should films try to become, before the local realities are distorted or local sensibilities are affected? Where does documentary end and drama begin? These questions will continue to be debated across India and elsewhere while Slumdog enthralls millions on its first theatrical release.
Feature film makers can exercise their creative license far more than factual film makers. I doubt if the creators of authentic, close-to-the-ground movies like City of God and Slumdog Millionaire set out with any specific social agenda. They are in the business of entertainment, and just happen to find plenty of drama in real life in places like urban slums. We might argue that in the right hands, dramatised movies can draw mass attention to development issues and challenges far more effectively than the often dull and dreary documentaries.
Kalpana Sharma: Eyes wide open“If through (the movie) the world gets a peek at an India inhabited by millions of people who continue to live their lives without clean water, sanitation or electricity, what is the problem?” asks another Indian friend and long-time Mumbai resident Kalpana Sharma.
In a perceptive essay titled Shantytowns of the Mind, written in The Indian Express in early January 2009 before she saw the film, Kalpana flagged important concerns: “Slumdog Millionaire’s success raises some deeper questions. How do we depict poverty as writers, filmmakers, journalists? Is it fair to expect us all the time to give a full, balanced, sensitive portrayal? Or is it inevitable that we write, film, for our audiences? And if, as a byproduct, people are sensitized, so be it. Also, if they are annoyed, so be it. If we are considered exploitative, so be it.”
Kalpana speaks with authority, and not just because she lives in the megacity of Mumbai (population: 13 million and rising) which, she points out, is half made up of slums. In 2000, she wrote a book titled Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia’s Largest Slum. Far from being a cold, clinical analysis of facts, figures and trends, it’s a book about the extraordinary people who live there, “many of whom have defied fate and an unhelpful State to prosper through a mix of backbreaking work, some luck and a great deal of ingenuity”.
Kalpana ends her essays with these words: “In the end you realise as a writer, a journalist or a filmmaker, that the best you can do is to shine a torch, a searchlight, on an entrenched problem. But the solution will not be found merely by that illumination. For that, there are many more steps to be taken.
“Slumdog Millionaire has focused its lens on the children of India’s slums through a work of fiction. What we do to change their future is the non-fiction that has yet to be written.”
As I wrote at the time: “The few of us thus became the first outsiders to see the film which I found both deeply moving and very ironic. With minimal narration, he allows the local people to tell their own story. There’s only one expert who quickly explains just what is going on in this particularly weather-prone part of the world.”
The world’s rich are having a party, and millions living in poverty are the ones footing the bill. This is the premise of the film, which looks at the impact of climate change on the inhabitants of Ghoramara and Sagar islands in the the Sundarban delta region in the Bay of Bengal.
Almost 7,000 inhabitants have been forced to leave Ghoramara in the last 30 years, as the island has become half in size. The biggest island, Sagar which hosted refugees from other islands all these years is witnessing massive erosion now. 70,000 people in the 9 sea-facing islands are at the edge of losing land in next 15 years. For these people climate change is real.
As the sea level rises and takes with it homes and livelihoods in the delta, the villagers of Sagar are paying a hefty price for a problem that they did not create. Meanwhile, middle class India and the political elite are becoming aware of the problem of global warming, but prefer to look the other way.
I’m glad to note that the film is now being screened to various audiences and making ripples. By showing people – including those still not convinced about climate change – what sea level rise is already doing to poor people, the film is stretching the limits of debate and focusing attention on the need to act, not just talk.
It’s also creating ripples in environmental and/or human rights activist circles where all too often, passionate discussions don’t go very far beyond the rhetoric to bring in the real world voices and testimonies. Pradip’s film accomplishes this with authenticity and empathy yet, mercifully, without the shrill and overdose of analysis found in activist-made films. It powerfully and elegantly tells one of the biggest stories of our times.
Pradip SahaIn November 2008, Pradip showed and talked about his film at a screening organised by SACREDMEDIACOW (SMC), an independent postgraduate collective on Indian media research and production (and much more) at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. Before it started, Pradip told his audience to ‘forget that this is a documentary about climate change’ and just watch.
As one member of his audience, Sophia Furber, later wrote: “The film’s approach to climate change is completely non-didactic. Mean Sea Level is no acronym-fest sermon or disaster story, but an intimate portrait of a way of life which is on the verge of going underwater.”
In his day job as editor of Down to Earth magazine, published from India with a global outlook, Pradip excels in wading through the (rapidly expanding) sea of jargon and acronyms surrounding many topics related to science, environment and development. In typical style, his recently started blog is named alphabet soup @ climate dinner.
Read Sophia Furber’s account of SOAS screening in London
The more Pradip shares his film, the more people who notice the irony that I experienced in Tokyo. A short review by the Campaign against Climate Change says: “There is a greater irony. These poor people got nothing out of the economy that created climate change, nor do they contribute to global warming. Mean Sea Level is a testimony of reckless political economy of our times. Climate change is real, and only a sign of our recklessness.”
Last heard, Pradip was planning to screen MEAN Sea Level on Sagar Island so that the story’s participants can see the film for themselves. The idea was to power the event entirely through renewable energy sources, such as solar power.
I hope he will soon place his film – or at least highlights/extracts – online on YouTube or another video sharing platform. This film is too important to be confined to film festivals and public screenings. Whether it would also be broadcast on television in India and elsewhere, we’ll just have to wait and see. I won’t hold my breath on that one…
Jantakarn Thep-Chuay, known as Beam
For many weeks, Jantakarn Thep-Chuay — nicknamed Beam -– did not understand why her father was not coming home. The eight-year-old girl, in Takuapa in Thailand’s southern district of Phang Nga, had last seen him go to work on the morning of 26 December 2004.
“On that Sunday, the day there was a wave, my dad wore his tennis shoes,” she recalls as she gets into his pair of sandals. “My dad didn’t have to do much work — he just walked around looking after workers.”
Beam’s father Sukaroak –- a construction supervisor at a new beach resort in Khao Lak –- was one of thousands of Thais and foreign tourists killed when the Asian Tsunami hit without warning. His body was never found.
For months, Beam would draw pictures of her family. These, and family photos of happier times, helped her to slowly come to terms with what happened.
The first year was long and hard for the family Sukaroak left behind: Beam, her two-year-old brother Boom, and mother Sumontha, 28. The determined young widow struggled to keep home fires burning -– and to keep her troublesome in-laws at bay.
As if that were not enough, she also had to engage assorted bureaucracies: even obtaining an official death certificate for her late husband entailed much effort.
Just a few weeks after the disaster, the local authorities approached Sumontha suggesting that she gives away one or both her children for adoption. Apparently a foreigner was interested. She said a firm ‘No’.
“Her dad wanted Beam to become an architect. He was hoping for a day when he could build something she draws,” says Sumontha. “If I am still alive, I want to raise my own children. I am their mother. For better or worse, I want to raise them myself.”
The Tsunami destroyed Beam’s school, but she continued to attend a temporary school set up with local and foreign help. Before the year ended, she moved to a brand new ‘Tsunami School’ that the King of Thailand built to guarantee education for all children affected by the disaster.
Sumontha, Beam and Boom are three ordinary Asians who have shown extraordinary courage, resilience and resourcefulness as they coped with multiple challenges of rebuilding their lives after the Tsunami. Theirs is one of eight families that we followed throughout 2005, under our empathetic communication initiative called Children of Tsunami: Rebuilding the Future.
It was a multi-country, multi-media project that tracked how ordinary Asians rebuilt their lives, livelihoods and futures after one of the biggest disasters in recent years. We at TVE Asia Pacific documented on TV, video and web the personal recovery stories of eight affected families in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand for a year after the disaster. Our many media products — distributed on broadcast, narrowcast and online platforms -– inspired wide ranging public discussion on disaster relief, recovery and rehabilitation. In that process, we were also able to demonstrate that a more engaged, respectful kind of journalism was possible when covering post-disaster situations.
Four countries, eight locations: where Children of Tsunami stories were filmed for much of 2005
Meet the Children of Tsunami…
They have never met each other. Yet they were united first in grief, then in survival. Five girls and three boys, between 8 to 16 years of age, living in eight coastal locations in four countries. Their families were impacted by the Asian Tsunami in different ways. Some lost one or both parents -– or other family members. Some had their homes or schools destroyed. Others found their parents thrown out of a job. During the year, these families faced many hardships and challenges in rebuilding their futures.
Filming with Theeban in eastern Sri Lanka...now only a memory
As I recalled in early 2007, when we tragically lost one of eight survivor children – Theeban – to Sri Lanka’s civil war: “As journalists, we have been trained not to get too attached to the people or subjects we cover, lest they affect our judgment and dilute our objectivity. The four production teams involved in Children of Tsunami initially agreed to follow this norm when we met in Bangkok in early 2005 for our first (and only) planning meeting. We also resolved not to reward our participating families in cash or kind, as they were all participating voluntarily with informed consent.
“But the ground reality was different. 2005, Asia’s longest year, wore on. As survivors slowly patched their lives together again, our film teams found themselves becoming friends of families or playing Good Samaritan. Sometimes our teams would find a survivor family close to starvation and — acting purely as human beings, not journalists — they would buy dry rations or a cooked meal. At other times, finding the children restless or aimless, they would buy them a football, kite or some other inexpensive toy that would produce hours of joy and cheer.
“As commissioners and publishers of Children of Tsunami stories, we didn’t object to these acts of kindness. Journalism with empathy was far preferable to the cold detachment that textbooks recommend.”
Children of Tsunami: No More Tears (25 mins) was the shorter version of the end-of-year film that captured the highlights and ‘lowlights’ of our families’ first year following the disaster. We co-produced it with the Singapore-based regional broadcaster Channel News Asia.
Death has no sense of timing, but it sometimes leaves traces of irony. The day Americans were electing an energetic and articulate senator from Chicago as their next president, one of Chicago’s most celebrated citizens lost his battle with cancer.
Michael Crichton, who died on 4 November 2008, was trained as a medical doctor but played several roles in the creative arts world. He was a prolific author of science fiction and medical fiction, whose books have sold over 150 million copies worldwide. He also produced and directed techno-thriller movies, and was the creator of the highly successful medical drama series on television, ER (Emergency Room), now in its 15th season.
In the domain of popular culture, Crichton was best known for writing Jurassic Park (1990). This cautionary tale on unrestrained biological tinkering was turned into a blockbuster movie by Steven Spielberg in 1993. It became the highest earning film up until that time.
Before and since, Crichton used his technical training, vivid imagination and mastery of English to spin some of the most enjoyable – and scary – stories that often depicted scientific advancements going awry, resulting in the worst-case scenarios. A notable recurring theme in Crichton’s plots is the pathological failure of complex systems and their safeguards, whether biological (Jurassic Park), military/organizational (The Andromeda Strain), technical (Airframe) or cybernetic (Westworld).
Crichton was also a talented essayist who wrote perceptive pieces of non-fiction about science, society and culture – including the role of media. It is one such essay that I would like to recall in his memory.
The media world was very different when, in 1993, Crichton riled the news business with an essay titled “Mediasaurus“. In this essay, written for the newly launched Wired magazine, he prophesied the death of the mass media — specifically the New York Times and the American commercial TV networks.
“To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within ten years. Vanished, without a trace,” he wrote.
Building on his credentials as the author of a best-seller on dinosaurs, Crichton called this endangered beast ‘mediasaurus’.
Mediasaurus - courtesy Slate He added: “There has been evidence of impending extinction for a long time. We all know statistics about the decline in newspaper readers and network television viewers. The polls show increasingly negative public attitudes toward the press – and with good reason.”
He talked about technological advances — “artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page” — that would drive the mediasaurus to their inevitable doom.
Only those nimble, adaptable media products would survive, he said, noting that CNN and C-SPAN were steps in the right direction, giving viewers direct access to events as they happen.
But he had no sympathy for the media. “The media are an industry, and their product is information. And along with many other American industries, the American media produce a product of very poor quality. Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it’s sold without warranty. It’s flashy but it’s basically junk. So people have begun to stop buying it.”
Like most people who dabble in the imperfect art of foreseeing the future, Crichton got the trend right but the timing somewhat wrong. The mainstream media (MSM) were indeed on the decline but not at the dramatic rate that he envisaged.
In February 2002, Jack Shafer wrote a piece in the online magazine Slate titled “Who You Calling Mediasaurus?” Its subtitle was: “The New York Times dodges Michael Crichton’s death sentence”. It asked and tried an answer the question: Where did Crichton go wrong?
Shafer wrote: “Fables of the near future have a way of never materializing, whether they be fevered dreams of nuclear energy too cheap to meter or fossil fuels too expensive to burn. To be fair, Crichton wasn’t the only one to get puking drunk on the new media moonshine. Many of us spent a lost weekend—sometimes months—in a stupor after reading early issues of Wired. But instead of blotting out conventional media, the emerging Infotopia seems only to have made the conventional media more ubiquitous.”
Shafer asked: “Who would have predicted in 1993 that America’s great dailies (minus the Wall Street Journal) and the news networks would dodge both extinction and irrelevance by erecting Web sites overnight and giving their content away? That they would use their Web sites to keep us informed 24-hours-a-day in a way that we take for granted today but that would have astonished us nine years ago?”
In an email interview with Shafer at the time, Crichton acknowledged his own limitations: “I don’t have a lot invested in whether my predictions are right or wrong; I assume that nobody can predict the future well. But in this particular case, I doubt I’m wrong, it’s just too early.”
In that interview, Crichton said he wished he had foreseen “the effect of big media conglomerates combined with the universal decision to make news into entertainment. It’s all headlines and chat now. Factual content is way down, accuracy has vanished (it’s not even a goal any longer), and public confidence in media is at an astonishing low. Not surprisingly, audiences are shrinking.”
Crichton admitted at the time that the personalized ‘infotopia’ he envisioned in 1993 had yet to arrive. He scoffed at the Web for being too slow. “Its page metaphor, too limiting. Design, awful. Excessive hypertexting, too distracting. Noise-to-signal ratio, too high.”
Who succeeds mediasaurus?Now fast-forward to May 2008. The same Jack Shafer, once again writing in Slate, published a piece titled “Michael Crichton, Vindicated”. It was introduced as: “His 1993 prediction of mass-media extinction now looks on target”.
In this essay, Shafer wrote: “As we pass his prediction’s 15-year anniversary, I’ve got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It’s gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren’t going extinct tomorrow, Crichton’s original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.”
Read Jack Shafer’s full interview with Michael Crichton in Slate, May 2008
Revealed: the weapon that killed MediasaurusBy this time, Crichton was more positive about the web. He noted that the Web has “made it far easier for the inquisitive to find unmediated information, such as congressional hearings.” It’s much faster than it used to be, and more of its pages are professionally assembled.
Crichton suggested that readers and viewers could more objectively measure the quality of the news they consume by pulling themselves “out of the narcotizing flow of what passes for daily news.” Look at a newspaper from last month or a news broadcast.
“Look at how many stories are unsourced or have unnamed sources. Look at how many stories are about what ‘may’ or ‘might’ or ‘could’ happen,” he said. “Might and could means the story is speculation. Framing as I described means the story is opinion. And opinion is not factual content.”
He summed it up with something we already know: “The biggest change is that contemporary media has shifted from fact to opinion and speculation.”
It was interesting to note how mainstream media outlets paid tributes to Crichton this week. He was remembered for the entertaining story teller he truly was, and some even questioned his mixed legacy, for example being an ardent skeptic of global warming – thus batting for the fossil fuel cartels even if only inadvertently.
But I could find few references to his perceptive critique of the mass media.
Who says media likes to turn the spotlight on itself?
October 8 is the International Day for Disaster Reduction. The United Nations system observes the day ‘to raise the profile of disaster risk reduction, and encourage every citizen and government to take part in building more resilient communities and nations’.
Disaster risk reduction (abbreviated as DRR) is the common term for many and varied techniques that focus on preventing or minimising the effects of disasters. DRR measures either seek to reduce the likelihood of a disaster occurring, or strengthen the people’s ability to respond to it.
DRR is not just another lofty piece of developmentspeak. Unlike many other development measures that are full of cold statistics and/or hot air, this one directly (and quietly) saves lives, jobs and properties.
And it gives people peace of mind – we can’t put a value on that. That was the point I made in a blog post written in December 2007, on the third anniversary of the Indian Ocean Tsunami. Taking the personal example of J A Malani, an ordinary Sri Lankan woman living in Hambantota, on the island’s southern coast, I talked about how she has found peace of mind from a DRR initiative.
Recently, IDRC’s inhouse series ‘Research that Matters’ has published an article about the project. Titled “For Easy Sleep Along the Shore: Making Hazard Warnings More Effective” its blurb reads: “In Sri Lanka, a grassroots pilot study combines advanced communication technologies with local volunteer networks to alert coastal villages to danger coming from the sea.”
TVE Asia Pacific also made a short video film in late 2007. Called The Long Last Mile, it can be viewed on YouTube in two parts:
The Long Last Mile, part 1 of 2:
The Long Last Mile, part 2 of 2:
The recent IDRC article ends with this para: “A related challenge concerns the shortness of any society’s attention span. In the absence of frequent crises and alerts, how can a nation — or even a village — sustain the continuing levels of preparedness essential to ensure that, when the next big wave comes rolling in and the sirens sound, its people will have the motivation and the capacity to act? The follow-up project seeks to address this worry by preparing the hotels and villages to respond to different types of hazards, rather than only to the relatively rare tsunamis.”
“Our teacher said our country is small and is surrounded by the sea….she showed it on the globe.”
With these words, young Lakshani Fernando (photo, above) begins telling us the compact story of her short life.
Lakshani, 9, has lived by the sea (Indian Ocean) from the time she was born. When she was just six, the Asian Tsunami of December 2004 destroyed their beachfront house in Koralawella, Moratuwa, on Sri Lanka’s western coast. More than three years later, when my colleague Buddhini Ekanayake met Lakshani in March 2008, the family was still struggling to raise their heads from that massive blow.
In the film, Lakshani shares the highlights of a typical day. That includes going for a walk on the polluted beach with her fisherman father, spending a few hours at the nearby school and playing with neighbourhood children. While at it, she tells us her wishes for a cleaner beach and a better neighbourhood.
Buddhini called Lakshani a ‘Child of the Sea’. Even the cruel waves of the tsunami didn’t scare Lakshani away for too long.
“I love to play with waves…” Lakshani says towards the end of the film. Then she looks far out at the horizon, and talks again. “There are ships far out at sea. That’s all there is…”
She might not yet imagine lands beyond ships and waves, but last week, her story travelled across the seas. Over 500 broadcast media managers, journalists and researchers from around the world, who’d gathered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for Asia Media Summit 2008, had a glimpse of Lakshani when the first 90 seconds of the film was screened during plenary.
Elizabeth Smith, secretary general of the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association (CBA), chose an extract from Lakshani’s story to introduce the media initiative. Sitting in the audience, I immediately texted the news to Buddhini.
Watch “I am A Child of the Sea”:
This film forms part of a series that has 20 TV producers from 13 countries engaging in a co-production of a short programmes series (mini documentaries) about and for children. The series is the outcome of a regional project organised by the Asia Pacific Institute for Broadcasting Development (AIBD) in collaboration with the French Ministry of Foreign affairs, the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association (CBA),Thomson Foundation, Prix Jeunesse, Children and Broadcasting Foundation for Africa and RTM-IPTAR of Malaysia.
The project tries to capture cultural diversity through the eyes of children. When its concept first reached us, it was defined very narrowly in terms of ethnicity and/or religion. TVE Asia Pacific being a strictly secular organisation, we couldn’t fit into such a tight range. Besides, we realised that many modern day children have a self identity that goes above and beyond the race and religion that blind chance of birth assigned to them.
So we took an editorial decision: instead of doing a story that highlights factors that utterly and bitterly divide humanity (such as race and religion, both of which fuel the long-drawn war in Sri Lanka), we would look for a unifying factor. The tsunami’s killer waves, when they rolled in, didn’t care for our petty human divisions. For a few days and weeks following the tragedy, Sri Lanka was united in shock and grief in a manner I have never seen in my 42 years of living here. (Then we went back to killing each other again.)
The result of our search was Lakshani and her story captured in ‘I am a Child of the Sea’.
Buddhini chose to feature Lakshani after interviewing 10 children from different localities and a diversity of cultural backgrounds. (Never once did she ask for the child’s religion, which unlike ethnicity is not always apparent from the name.) There was some significance in featuring a child who identifies herself closely with the Sea in a country where tens of thousands of tsunami-affected people have still not come to terms with the sea. Even after the tsunami destroyed their home, Lakshani’s family moved to a ‘temporary’ shelter within sight of the sea. Thus, her story had a close association with the sea which formed part of her lifestyle, environment and culture.
Buddhini developed the script after several leisurely chats with Lakshani, based partly on the child’s own writing about herself. Filming the story took place in early March 2008, with the full consent of her parents, extended family and neighbours. Read more about the making of this film on TVEAP website and on Buddhini’s own blog.
Lakshani’s story is symbolic at another level. It reveals how, despite receiving a massive outpouring of donations from all over the world, some tsunami-affected families are still struggling to put together their shattered lives. The litany of woes, missed opportunities and sometimes outright plundering of donations came out strongly in the first hand accounts of affected people (in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand) who spoke to us during the Children of Tsunami media project. Read our reflections on the project in Communicating Disasters book published in 2007.
Lakshani’s family is not typical of Sri Lanka’s tsunami affected persons. Unlike most such families, the Fernandos live on the western coast, relatively close to Colombo. Although wave action destroyed or damaged beachfront homes in these areas, most attention was focused on areas in the south, east and north of the island that were hit much harder. So those affected and living on the west coast have often been overlooked or dismissed lightly. In this sense, Lakshani’s family has some parallels with what I called ‘step-children of tsunami’.
There is a bit more cheerful post-script to this story. During several visits to Lakshani and family for researching, filming and editing this film, Buddhini (who has a daughter aged four herself) bonded with the girl. It became more than a mere film-making venture, and has led to a lasting relationship. Meanwhile, young voice artiste Shanya Fernando, who rendered Lakshani’s Sinhala voice into English for an international audience, has also felt an attachment to the ‘star’ of our film.
While the film was made with the informed consent of Lakshani’s family who received no material benefits for their participation, both Buddhini and Shanya have since presented some basic educational gifts to Lakshani — who is certainly in need of such help. And who am I to stand in the way of such gestures of human kindness?
In May 1964 director Stanley Kubrick and science fiction author Arthur C Clarke embarked on a creative collaboration: a novel and a screenplay inspired by Clarke’s 1950 short story “The Sentinel.” In December 1965, many ideas, drafts, and titles later, filming commenced on 2001: A Space Odyssey. The futuristic epic, placed in the first year of the new millennium, premiered in the US in April 1968 — and went on to become one of the finest science fiction movies made.
Official MGM trailer for 2001: A Space Odyssey
As the Academy noted on its website: “With its epoch-spanning storyline and its nearly dialogue-free script, 2001: A Space Odyssey combined the production value of Hollywood film-making with the artistic sensibility of European cinema. Its cerebral approach to the genre helped usher in a new, more literate age of science fiction cinema, and its extraordinary imagery – the widescreen 70mm cinematography of Geoffrey Unsworth, the visually dazzling and scrupulously researched production design, and especially the Oscar®-winning special effects – instantly became the benchmark by which all space films would be judged.”
The film’s best known connection to Sri Lanka is that its co-creator Arthur C Clarke had by then settled down there. During the 1964-68 period that he was associated with the production, Clarke would make periodic returns to his Colombo home — first from New York, where he brainstormed with Kubrick for weeks, and then from England, where the movie went into production. Filming of 2001 began in December 1965 in Shepperton Studios, Shepperton, England. Soon, filming was moved to MGM-British Studios in Borehamwood.
The anniversary coverage has triggered my memories of another, much less known Sri Lankan connection with the film. The accomplished Sri Lankan engineer, painter and sculptor H R (Hapugoda Rankothge) Premaratne worked on the movie’s special effects, all of which was hand-made. (Not a single computer was involved in creating the movie, which still awes movie-goers many of who take computer generated imagery, or CGI, completely for granted today.)
I got to know Premaratne (in photo above, affectionately known as Prema) in the late 1980s when he was special assistant to Arthur Clarke, in whose Colombo office I started working as a research assistant in 1987. I have just unearthed, from the depths of my own archives, an illustrated profile I wrote on Prema which appeared in The Island newspaper (Sri Lanka) on 26 January 1991. In a 2,000-word biographical sketch of the man that veteran journalist and biographer D B Dhanapala once called ‘a modern day Viswakarma’, I chronicle how Prema came to be associated with the movie’s production.
Prema had just retired in 1965 as Director of the Department of Public Works – in other words, the Ceylon government’s chief builder. By happy coincidence, 2001 was just entering its production stages around this time, so Clarke put Prema in touch with the Borehamwood Studios where elaborate sets for space scenes were being constructed. There, Prema worked with British and American set designers and special effects specialists.
Space station in the movie 2001, envisaged in the mid 1960s
Harry Lange, chief designer of Hawke Films Limited who was in charge of production designs, later wrote to Prema: “Not one model could have been brought to the exceptionally high standard required in this production without the skills and imagination of people like yourself.”
“Prema was a very skilled architect, his best known work being the magnificent Independence Hall,” Clarke recalled years later in his tribute to Prema upon the latter’s death in the early 1990s. “During his stay in England in the mid 1960s, I put him in touch with Stanley Kubrick, who was then making 2001: A Space Odyssey. Prema’s expertise in art and engineering was very valuable in the production of the movie’s special effects, and he assisted in the building of the spectacular space station.”
Excerpt from 2001: Arrival at the space station in Earth orbit
Prema capped his long and illustrious public service as Sri Lanka’s ambassador to Burma, concurrently accredited to Thailand, Laos and Singapore (1974-78). From 1983, he worked as Clarke’s special assistant, while pursuing his own painting, sculpture and design work from his home at Wijerama Mawatha, Colombo — a short walk from Clarke’s own residence at Barnes Place.
I remember visiting Prema at home on several occasions. After his wife passed away and son moved overseas, he lived alone in a large, old house that was teeming with works of art – it was like a private art gallery or museum. All over the garden, there were scaled replicas of famous rock sculptures from places like Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa. He pioneered a method of creating fibre glass replicas of archaeologically valuable statues and artefacts. These were used to showcase the best of Sri Lanka in major exhibitions in London, Washington DC and other capitals of the world in the 1980s.
In the late 1980s, Prema also painted a life-size portrait Arthur C Clarke as Chancellor of the University of Moratuwa, which is still on display at the Arthur Clarke Centre there (photo, below).
It’s a bit cliched to say this, but they don’t seem to make renaissance men like H R Premaratne anymore. He straddled the arts and sciences with equal dexterity and with impressive results in both spheres. He not only built bridges in newly independent Ceylon, but was himself a bridge between the Two Cultures of the sciences and humanities.
Just like his friend Arthur C Clarke was…
More information on making 2001: A Space Odyssey is found in the documentary, 2001: The Making of a Myth.
Some 366 days, 213 posts and over 63,800 page visits later, I can say it’s been an interesting – sometimes exhilerating – ride. I will expand on this post as soon as I have a chance, but for now I want to say Thank You to all my readers, and especially those who joined in our on-going conversation.
When I gave up eating all meat nearly 15 years ago, I had some explaining to do.
Breaking away from the pack is never that easy. Friends and colleagues wanted to know if I had suddenly gone religious (most certainly not: I practise no religion and frown upon all); or become an animal-hugger (well, not quite); or if I was too sick to eat a ‘normal diet’ anymore.
That last one was closer to the truth. I became a partial vegetarian because I wanted to stay healthy. I realised how unhygienic meat production and distribution were in my part of the world, and yes, I was also sensitive about the excessive cruelty to animals who end up on dining tables.
And it’s not just in Asia that organised meat production is increasingly hazardous to human health (not to mention the untold suffering by farm animals and the growing power of big agri-business companies). Animal rights and environmental activists have been pointing these out for years. And as powerful documentaries like Fast Food Nation(2006) documented, it is not only meat that’s crushed in the powerful mincing machine, but the whole of society.
I was delighted, therefore, to belatedly discover the innovative and insightful series called The Meatrix. Funnily, I heard about it from two sources almost at the same time. A Malaysian activist I was visiting in Georgetown, Penang, last week highly recommended it. Two days later, my colleague Manori Wijesekera returned from having screened one of our own films at the 16th Earth Vision Film Festival in Tokyo – where The Meatrix was a finalist in the children’s environmental film category.
The Meatrix is an animated spoof on The Matrix trilogy (1999 – 2003). It uses humor and thinly veiled characters and situations from the original Matrix films to educate the uninitiated about factory farms.
Evidently, it was made with the blessings of the Wachowski brothers who created the science fiction thriller series. The first animation, The Meatrix, starts when Moopheus the Cow finds Leo the Pig at a family farm and informs him that corporations are taking over the way farms used to be. By taking the blue pill, Leo can remain at ease in his current situation, or by taking the red pill, Leo can see just how far the rabbit hole goes. (Of course, the good Leo takes the red one.)
Watch the first animation on YouTube:
In this case, the Meatrix is the illusion created by big time agricultural corporations who have taken over most family-run farms in the west, and turned them into ruthless factories producing meat and dairy products. Those who take on the Meatrix – at grave risk to their life and limbs – reveal how these factory farms are pumping steroids, antibiotics and growth hormones to maximise production, exposing unsuspecting consumers to major health risks like mad cow disease and antiobiotic resistance.
There are two short sequels to the original Meatrix: The Meatrix II: Revolting, and The Meatrix II½. They all pack action, suspense and even a bit of romance….just like the Matrix films did. And all the Meatrix animations are under five minutes in duration – just right for the fast media generation!
The Meatrix is collaboration between GRACE (Global Resource Action Center for the Environment) and Free Range, a cutting-edge design company with a social conscience. It’s the mission of GRACE to eliminate factory farming and to preach the message that sustainable agriculture is both a better environmental and economic choice for rural communities.
In February of 2003, Free Range developed the Free Range Flash Activism Grant, offering the prize of a flash movie production to forward the work of a worthy nonprofit. GRACE was the first recipient, in recognition of its important work on farm reform.
When The Meatrix I launched in November 2003, the viral grassroots film broke new ground in online advocacy, creating a unique vehicle in which to educate, entertain and motivate people to create change. The Meatrix movies have been translated into more than 30 languages and are now the most successful online advocacy films ever with over 15 million viewers worldwide.
It’s time some of our development friends took a red pill to see what lies outside their charmed and illusory circles.
PS: By the way, I still eat fish and other seafood, largely because on my frequent travels in Asia I turn up in places where being a complete vegetarian is simply not realistic (try Korea, for example). I now say I eat only those creatures that swim, but none that walks on land. One of these days, I will give up temptations for all flesh…
Open Minds! 