Talking Pictures
Channel: LIVING SOCIOLOGY
Date: 18/12/2019

First Person, Plural on CFUV-fm, Victoria, BC 
Originally aired February 6, 2003

Thousands of film lovers will come out this week in Victoria to enjoy watching and talking about independent films.  Film Festivals are popping up all over the world as film-making becomes more technically and financially accessible.  

This week with spoke with two documentary filmmakers who are debuting their films at the Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival.  Sherry LePage will be showing From Baghdad to Peace Country, a film that follows Canadian Artist Deryk Houston's creative journey as he uses his art to cope with the devastation he observed in Iraq due to UN sanctions.  Tony Snowsill will be showing Criminal Acts, a film about a special inmate theatre group operating for 21 years at Victoria's William Head Prison.  Both these films are timely and controversial examinations of socially relevant issues. 

Dianne Searle is the director of MediaNet, a Victoria collective dedicated to assisting film and video makers in their efforts to learn more about filmmaking and to find inexpensive ways to make their films.  Searle talks with us about the ways in which digital technologies are changing filmmaking, including providing ways for video production to become a witness to the social and political events surrounding us.  

Finally, we discuss collectives, social networks and government funding as the means to combat cultural domination by the Hollywood oligopoly.  Technological advances have the potential to subvert what seems to be a growing trend towards homogeneous films and videos.  Can digital technology provide a way for small cultural producers to influence and change society?  We discuss the social context to these technologies. 

copyright: Carl Wilkerson and Pattie Thomas

http://sociologylegacy.pbworks.com/w/page/93416720/Episode%2034%20Talking%20Pictures