Verse

Every summer since 1988, the U.S public television series, Point of View, has shown documentary films. Since early in 2006, the documentary channel has been broadcasting documentaries 24/7.Cable television networks such as HBO, The History Channel, Discovery Channel and Bravo have similarly financed and aired many first-class documentaries. Bell Auditorium at the University of Minnesota became the first theatre in the U.S air exclusively documentary films. Film festivals such as the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival (Japan), and other film festivals are all devoted exclusively to the art of documentary.

And now shifting focus to the documentaries in Nepal, one cannot help but mention the much admired Tenzin Seshi, a robust 34 year old Tibetan man who speaks English in an eruption of phrases gleaned from quotes and Hollywood movies.

Being less scholarly and instead fascinated by glitz and glamour, Tenzin began a modeling career in 1998.Regrettably it wasn’t successful, but he persevered in the arts and in 2009 he congregated all that he had to solely organise a Tibetan cultural dance, universally known as Lung Ta, in Boudha. The event got him his first taste of triumph and also made Tenzin quite popular amongst the foreign tourists, many of who were also filmmakers. He was soon catapulted to the azure skies of cinema. Primarily he was casted in minor roles of international documentaries in countries like Germany, America and Russia.

Nevertheless Tenzing’s quest for cinema was escalating at rapid speed when in 2000 he seized an opportunity to work under a German director named Thorson Grun who not only included him in two important projects, ‘Baby massage’ and ‘Mahayana audination’, but also taught him one of the most critical component of film making- editing.

And then, in 2002, a contemporary expedition threw him into the centre of the documentary world when he worked under French director, Eric Valli, for National Geography for an assignment called ‘Honey Hunter’. In the same year he also worked with a young American director called Christ making a documentary about Tibetan singers who sang pop, rock, blues and jazz.

But it was in the closing stages of 2002 when, like a volcano about to erupt, Tenzin burst onto the stage, his raw, amateur passion driving to direct his first documentary feature film. In addition to directing, he caste and produced the film, entitled ‘Melong’ (there’s no creator or no creation, our mind is greater), exclusively on his own. **which he first projected in Bodhgaya, a holy assemblage where Tibetans from all around the globe gather. No prizes for guessing the answer, not only did he gross profit but also grossed a lot of appreciation for being the first Tibetan director as a certificate to which he was called in 2003 to Switzerland by Tibetan woman association to telecast his movie in one of the most legendary theater

Now, Like someone rightly said along with some fleeting rays of light also comes a tableau of darkness so Tenzin too was grown by stern authoritative parents who like old school thinking wanted him to do a course in engineering and get a decent job but a rebel he was.  He locked himself in a begrimed space with basic necessities learning all he could about films; from the Internet, exploring his camera, writing scripts etcetera

This he did for four long years until came a day when he apprehended that the acquaintance he acquired some technical polish for which he enrolled himself in AAFT (Asian academy of film and television).

Now coming back to today Tenzin has finished his second documentary again solely produced by him labeled ‘Miliu Rinopoche'(Precious human life) and is now mastering on his third feature film labeled the ‘Great misfortune life’ due to release on the Dec 25th

And finally like one knows when ends a caterpillar comes a butterfly, in the same manner Tensing too while talking of the procrastinated future rightly claims that until now he has only fulfilled his dream by directing three movies that belonged to his native language Tibet but the vision is still left where he hopes to direct movies not only for Nepal where cinema is still to mature leaps and bounds but also for international cinema.

Labin Rai from Sikkim faced a harsh childhood. Violence in the community and at home kept his early days in chaos. He dropped out of school early because the teacher physically abused him at times. ‘After that I struggled a lot, sometimes working as a cleaner in trucks, sometimes as a driver, sometimes doing other jobs’, he remembers. Finally, he saved enough money to buy a camera and with this camera, he began taking pictures of both rights and wrongs in his community. When he joined Video Volunteers, Labin knew what stories he wanted to bring out. He knew about the ethnic misunderstanding that happens in small communities. He knew of the deforestation going on in rural parts of North India. And what he captured with his camera are stories far more stunning that many of the stories shown on mainstream Indian news channels.

Labin is one of many unique reporters from Video Volunteers, a non profit organisation that delivers its name: Videos from Volunteers. Founded on the truth that no news agency or TV channel can report all of the issues that happen in our societies, especially not the issues related to the poor and rural population, Video Volunteers strives to bring marginalised voices to the fore. If someone from a similar community can take up the stance to bring out these unheard voices (India Unheard is one of the programs by Video Volunteers), then even such small places will be able to speak up and out to the big world. That is the true essence of Video Volunteers.

Jessica Mayberry founded video Volunteers in 2003 while spending time in India. Jessica is a TED Fellow, it is just one of the many awards she has won and the foundation itself has many awards likewise. Since then it has come to grow as a multi-national non-profit organisation with headquarters in New York and operational offices in Brazil and Goa, India. The volunteers in India are taught by Stalin K, an Indian documentary maker with his own great ideas. Jessica herself spends her time between India and New York. For this edition of Verse, Jessica has been kind enough to answer a few questions for us.

 

What led to the conception of Video Volunteers?

Jessica: There are hundreds of millions of poor people in India who don’t have a voice – meaning, the media doesn’t provide them the information they need, and their knowledge and ideas and stories are absent from the media. I started to see that today, rather than bemoaning the challenges of the mainstream, the poor can ‘make their own media’.

What were the first days like, especially keeping in mind the context of India?

Jessica: In the early days, I was spending most of my time out in the field training people, learning from rural women, being inspired. I still get to do that, but now I have a full organisation to run, so other people get to train the community members in video, so you could say the early days were more fun. It’s always hard to start a social enterprise or an NGO, but it is also very rewarding – and it makes me feel lucky to have been born in this time in history, when it is so easy to create cross-cultural exchanges and to work across time zones.

What has the reaction and support from government authorities been like?

Jessica: We are under their radar. Sometimes community producers run into problems with authorities, but also, there are times where the producers take help from local officials, or publicise programs that they run, and they find that beneficial. We do a lot of work on corruption, and that can of course attract attention. But our community producers also find people locally who are doing good things too.

How welcome are the general public to this idea? Do they open up to talk about their problems easily?

Jessica: People in villages are no different from us. Just as we love to publicise our daily activities on facebook, so they love to share their ideas on camera, in our community films. But it’s not always easy. People like to talk about what other people are doing that’s bad – ie,the government! But to talk about what they are doing, that’s hard – domestic violence, caste-ism – that is harder. But we’ve been lucky about that in many of our areas, we’ve been working for five years now, and we’ve had the staying power to show people that they can now open up about the tough things

What notable challenges have you faced, as a company or as field agents?

Jessica: We’re trying to professionalise our network of community producers so that we can expand more, by partnering with the mainstream media. But so many of our people face challenges that make it very hard to work the way the media will expect – they wake up at 5am to cook and clean; to get an interview, they sit for three hours on a bus, and then the official won’t talk to them. They have to courier their footage to us because there is no internet. These are the realities of working with the poor, and so we have to find partners (media buyers) who also buy into the mission.

Who are the major supporters behind VV? Has the collaboration with other NGOs/INGOs been fruitful?

Jessica: Our biggest supporters have been the Knight Foundation, Echoing Green, UNDP and a few others. And yes, NGOs are so crucial to our work. We got our start through six NGOs giving us the seed money to start our first programs. Only after we could say, ‘look, these local NGOs think media will make, a difference and are willing to pay for it, we must be on to something!’ to encourage funders to come on board.

What are your future plans for expansion, particularly Nepal?

Jessica: We would love to come to Nepal! We have a dear friend Thomas Kelly, www.thomaslkellyphotos.com, and we hope to bring Video Volunteers to more places through him.

What would be the number one thing you’d tell to a ‘video volunteer’ that wants to set afoot capturing the hidden stories in our society?

Jessica:  Think about what you have, that no professional journalist has. Learn to discover the power of your own community connections, and the fact that you are someone who has lived through these hardships, and use this personal connection to become a valued journalist.’

We at Verse would like to thank Jessica for her time. We wish her luck and hope that all her future efforts be successful. Jessica can be found at:

Jessica Mayberry

Founding Director

www.videovolunteers.org

https://apps.facebook.com/causes/48114

Tweets by videovolunteers

Watch our videos: indiaunheard.videovolunteers.org

‘So, what exactly do you do here?’

Six months after Sattya Media Arts Collective established itself in its current building behind the zoo in Jawalakhel, this is one of the questions we hear most. And that’s fair enough, because for most people, a media arts collective is a new concept.

It was new for me, too, when I came to Kathmandu almost five months ago to intern with Sattya.

Sattya aims to be resource network for creative people in Nepal ‘for writers, photographers, filmmakers, journalists, artists, and storytellers of any medium. Sattya is a place where people can come and not only learn new skills, but share their skills as well; where people can express their own opinions in addition to hearing about the perspectives of others.

Sattya began when photographer and filmmaker Anya Vaverko and VENT! Magazine founder Yuko Maskay started talking about setting up a creative space in Kathmandu. Anya and Yuko saw that there were so many enthusiastic creative people here who lacked a place where they could gather and inspire each other. At almost every event or workshop, there is somebody who says to us ‘Wow, I didn’t know that this sort of place existed in Kathmandu’.

At Sattya, we want to make media accessible to everyone, whether they come from an artistic background or not. Our workshops and screenings have been attended by engineering students, bankers, salespeople, forestry workers, and communications consultants, in addition to writers, photographers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers. Our vision is to eventually be able to reach out to rural and non-English-speaking people as well as our current urban audience. We’re not there quite yet, but we’re working on it.

Some of Sattya’s most popular events are our weekly documentary film screenings, shown either on our rooftop or in the screening room, depending on the weather and season. We’ve shown documentaries on philosophy, DIY culture, religion, women’s rights, and climate change, shot in locations as varied as Liberia, Mongolia, Palestine, the US, and the Pacific.

In addition to our regular screenings, Sattya also runs a program called Docutalk, in which everyone is invited to take part in a post-film discussion with speakers knowledgeable about the film’s issues. In September, our Docutalk screening explored globalisation and garbage management through the Cairo-shot documentary Garbage Dreams, and featured speakers from trash and recycling organisations like WEPCO and the Kevin Rohan Memorial Fund. Docutalk is a great way to develop a different perspective on issues relevant to us ‘when we watch a story unfold on the screen, it touches us and provides us with a deeper understanding. Because of that, the post-film dialogue that is so central to Docutalk is not formal or theoretical. Everyone can have their say.

Sattya also offers media skills sharing workshops. Some of our members’ favourite workshops so far have focused on topics including blogging, photography, audio storytelling, and stencil making.

One area that we haven’t so far provided much training in, however, is that of filmmaking. This is because filmmaking requires a serious time commitment from both participants and facilitators. But there is some good news on the horizon ‘Sattya is planning a whole host of longer, more intensive workshops on film and photography that will take place over the next few months and into 2012.

 

Although we do love films in general, Sattya’s trainings and screenings focus on documentaries. We do this because we believe that documentaries provide different perspectives to those given by fiction films. Documentaries allow people to speak for themselves, and to tell their own stories about their lives, their experiences, and the issues that affect them and their communities.

Our favourite documentaries have a few things in common: they have little or no narration; they follow an individual or a family closely and without hiding anything; they show us lives and lifestyles we would not otherwise be able to come close to understanding; they leave us with more questions than answers; and they are filmed over long periods of time ‘three years in the case of one of our most-loved documentaries, Last Train Home.

But most of all, our favourite documentaries are simply inspiring. They are beautifully shot, they make us ask questions, and they leave us wide-eyed at the end, wanting to know more. They do not just advocate for a cause, nor just show pretty pictures or scenes of poverty. They invite us in, keep us riveted, and tell us a story. Sometimes we even forget they are documentaries.

This is why we believe documentary filmmaking to be a hugely important skill to share with others.

 

‘Documentaries allow us to understand a perspective that is totally different from our own and to look into a lifestyle, a world, that is maybe totally foreign to us,’ Anya says. ‘Unlike other media, such as photography or writing, documentaries appeal to people no matter what their literacy, education or background is.’

‘Documentaries have a tendency to touch us more than a news article and often more than a photo, even though those are also important media. A documentary can push people into action, can cause people to change their perspectives, and can also be just an amazing tool to teach people about the world around them.’

Although a number of documentaries have been made in Nepal, and despite the hard work of some great organisations and film festivals, few local documentaries have managed to reach a broad audience. Many international documentaries are also poorly-distributed or simply go un-shown in Nepal, as well as in many other places around the world. Sometimes, the only documentaries people have seen are those that were shown to them in school, which often leads people to think of all documentaries as boring.

‘Documentaries don’t have to just be about poverty or sad stories. They can be funny, they can be inspiring, they can be about anything. They can be shot beautifully, and they can be just as interesting as a fiction film, if not more. ‘Fact is stranger than fiction’, right?’

That said, documentaries can still be powerful tools for advocacy and activism. ‘At their best, they can change people’s perspectives and bring about real social change,’ Anya says. ‘Nepal must have millions upon millions of untold stories. They deserve to be recognised and shared.’

For aspiring documentary filmmakers, Anya’s advice is to push the boundaries and break the mould.

‘Documentaries that take place in Nepal don’t have to start with a montage of the Himalayas, Durbar Square, and city traffic, overlaid with traditional Nepali music. I want to see documentaries that are not made for foreigners about ‘the mystical Himalayan kingdom’ or a poverty-stricken third-world country.’

‘I want to see more documentaries made for a Nepali audience, both urban and rural, on themes like the urban arts and music scene, or what it’s like growing up a transgender child in a rural village, or what it’s like being a woman who is forced to live in a shed during her period.’

Even the smallest two sentence article in the newspaper is just waiting to be turned into a powerful, meaningful documentary.