Lights, Camera, Social Action
Channel: LIVING SOCIOLOGY
Date: 18/12/2019

First Person, Plural on CFUV-fm, Victoria, BC 
Originally aired February 27, 2003

Turns out, our little home town (okay, small city) of Victoria is quite a haven for documentary filmmaking, especially documentaries with a social conscience.  This was made evident recently at the Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival where six socially conscious films created in some part by Victorians were featured.  Seven of the Victorians connected to the films were present to discuss how documentaries affect social change.  The panel, The Changing Image, was sponsored by the Victoria Film Producers Association.  

We were inspired by ViFPA's panel to think about the role that documentaries play in making social change and if that role has changed as film-making has become more accessible through digital technologies.  To further explore our thoughts on the subject we interviewed Sher Morgan, director, co-producer and co-writer of the film, Silence of the Strings, and with Dianne Searle, Executive Director of a local media cooperative called MediaNet. 

We found that documentary making is story-telling at its base and documentaries with social change in mind seek to tell stories that get lost in mainstream media.  The new technologies are making more stories available, especially in an environment like Victoria where knowledge and equipment are shared within formal and informal networks.  But there is a great big bottleneck at the point of distribution.  The new digital channels and the Internet offered some hope of opening up the possibilities of distributing such works to a wider audience, but these avenues seem to be controlled by other, more commercial interests.  That control thwarts the social change aspect of these works because these outlets tend to support, explicitly or implicitly. the status quo.  Thus to affect social change, alternative avenues of distribution are necessary.  This makes the filmmaker an activist in more than one sense of the word.

copyright: Carl Wilkerson and Pattie Thomas

http://sociologylegacy.pbworks.com/w/page/93416801/Episode%2036%20Lights%2C%20Camera%2C%20Social%20Action