I have produced both stand alone documentary films and also video content designed as a part of a multimedia package of video, text and photos, an internet friendly media form that I use increasingly. Multimedia entails simultaneously balancing the multiple roles of interviewing people, taking notes, shooting video clips and stills photos.
Participatory video is a methodology which is gaining credence as a way of empowering communities to tell their story. I have managed a number of projects and received training from Insightshare. Read more about it in my article, ‘The Power of Participatory video.’
CA$H-In COP-Out – The Glasgow COP26 Climate Summit
This documentary tells how Glasgow’s COP26 climate summit notched-up yet another year of talks that failed to find a solution to the climate emergency. Thousands converged at COP26 with polarised objectives. Businesses sought deals to cash-in from the climate crisis. Thousands more took to the streets, furious at the COP-out by world leader’s failing to act, causing dangerous climate impacts to spiral out of control. Indigenous Peoples repeated their demands for land and justice, highlighting how extractive industries and their politicians are murdering land defenders who get in the way of profits.
Multimedia video
‘Actual Possession? The Fight to save Malaysia’s dwindling rainforests’ is an 8 minute video about the Temiar people of peninsula Malaysia who are struggling to protect their ancestral domain forests from a sustained assault by state sponsored loggers and plantation developers.
This formed part of a photo-feature-video multimedia package produced for Mongabay.com titled, ‘Indigenous groups, activists risk arrest to blockade logging in Malaysia.” The package was awarded second place by the website in the list of top ten stories for 2017.
Full length documentary
‘Defenders of the Spirit forest’ is a 25 minute documentary set in Cambodia which was selected for premiere screening at the Document International Human Rights Film Festival in 2014. My role in the production spanned script, shooting, editing and directing, together with the help of a great team of friends and professionals. Ben Mowat was especially supportive in composing the music score and sound engineering. Ken Turner of http://www.designimage.co.uk/ produced some amazing visual effects (VFX).
The film is set in the Cardamom mountains, a remaining jewel of biodiversity in a country where forests are dwindling fast. Still home to rare species like the Siamese crocodile and Asian elephant, the forest is under great pressure from people exploiting its natural resources.
This film explores the pressures from the perspective of the local indigenous people who have been custodians of the forest for generations. For them the forest and its creatures are part of a rich spiritual world that is respected and revered. Now their lives are under threat from a proposed hydro-electric dam which threatens to sweep away their land and the sacred forests on which they depend.
More details of the film including published media around the issues can be found at: http://www.spiritforest.org