Skylight Pictures Updates

Announcing IJCentral

2009-01-29T17:23:01Z

IJCentral is a resource for concerned citizens around the world who want an effective International Criminal Court that will be able to prosecute perpetrators of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. Join the movement for international justice!

Click here to go the IJCentral Website

Quechua 2.0 - A Film Reborn

2008-09-09T21:04:00Z

With support from the Sundance Documentary Film Program’s first round of Audience Engagement grants, we just launched the Quechua version of State of Fear in Peru. A tour of extraordinary public screenings took us through the Andean regions of Ayacucho and Apurimac, both of which suffered the brunt of the violence in Peru’s 20-year war with Shining Path. The Peruvian Truth & Reconciliation Commission (PTRC), whose work State of Fear is based on, found that 70% of the conflict’s more than 69,000 victims, mostly innocent civilians caught in the crossfire, were Quechua speakers – so we felt it was imperative to make a version of the film dubbed into Quechua, to make the findings of the PTRC available to the audience most affected by Peru’s war on terror in the first feature-length documentary ever translated into Quechua.

We call the launch EDMQ 2.0 (for Estado de Miedo Quechua, the Spanish title for State of Fear Quechua) because we created a multi-platform website for the project (http://www.edmquechua.com) designed as a hub to engage human rights activists, victims, educators and youth with the social networking power of Web 2.0, using Twitter text messaging technology, photo sharing, Google maps, blogfeeds, and videoclips from the field. We brought FLIP video cameras, simple devices that allow videoclips to be posted directly to the web, which we gave to key local activists and showed them how to upload the clips to the project site. The FLIP works as a great human rights communication tool, ideal for recording comments and reactions from audience members right after a screening, and then immediately sharing them on the website. Here is an example of one of the first posts, a shot of the hundreds of people that attended the screening in the central plaza of the village of Socos, where the film was projected onto a huge white sheet hanging from the balcony of the Mayor’s office (more clips can be seen on the project site, in Spanish and Quechua):

Reactions to the Quechua version have been passionate and audiences have enthusiastically embraced the film – the impact of seeing their story in their own language can’t be underestimated. One of the big surprises was the amount of young people that came to the screenings, university students that expressed a desire to use the film to spread knowledge about Peru’s tragic conflict, a conflict that most of them only experienced as children if at all. It really feels like the rebirth of State of Fear after its original 2005 release in English and Spanish, and surely is the most important version we’ve made, with the promise of a long life in the Quechua-speaking regions of Peru. In order to make sure that the EDMQ version has as wide a reach as possible, we are promoting the copyleft concept and encouraging people to make as many copies of the film as they need, and download the screening workshop guide from the project web hub. Human rights organization COMISEDH, our key collaborator in the Ayacucho area, told audience members that if they brought a blank DVD to their offices they would burn them a copy, and they’ve been going like hotcakes.

The initial screenings of EDMQ have stirred controversy, because for the first time Quechua-speaking audiences are able to absorb the groundbreaking conclusions of the PTRC, and human rights activists are planning to use the film for political organizing, especially around the campaign to create an official Register of Victims to claim reparations from the State. In its Final Report, released in August 2003, the PTRC concluded that the political parties, military, police, insurgent groups (Shining Path and MRTA) and oblivious bystanders of Lima high society all shared the blame for the human devastation, but that the State because it was supposed to protect and not massacre its citizens, bore a special responsibility to compensate the victims. This has engendered fierce and relentless opposition from the political parties and the military, accusing the PTRC of being pro-terrorist and unpatriotic, accusations that completely distort the conclusions and spirit of reconciliation that animate the Final Report. No doubt Peru’s current President, Alan García, and Vice-President, Admiral Luis Giampietri, both of whom are implicated in the prison massacre of El Frontón that occurred during García’s first administration (1985-1990), would like to see the Final Report disappear. But it’s not going away – the PTRC rewrote the narrative of Peru’s 20-year war on terror, and in Quechua it now has a direct connection to those whose lives were most afflicted by the violence. The regional government of Ayacucho, dominated by President Garcia’s APRA party, already canceled a screening that had been planned for the main plaza of the city. But COMISEDH and other human rights activists are undaunted – they are taking State of Fear to small communities throughout the region in an ongoing campaign for truth and justice.

With support from the Ford Foundation we assembled the team of Quechua translators for State of Fear, and produced a 2-DVD set (with Quechua & Spanish versions of the film, a short on the ongoing trial of Alberto Fujimori and other extras, and a workshop guide). We produced 200 copies to distribute to Peru’s Human Rights Coordinating Committee (Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos), which are being distributed to their 67 member organizations throughout Peru.

The Reckoning accepted at BritDoc 08 Good Pitch

2008-06-28T19:07:00Z

The Reckoning was just accepted to the BritDoc 08 Good Pitch”, a special pitching session in Oxford, England designed for social issue documentary projects, with a focus on outreach funding. The International Justice Central/Hub mapping prototype we developed at the BAVC Producer’s Institute will be a central part of our pitch, as will our network of outreach partners! This will provide a good opportunity to raise funds for the outreach campaign. The Good Pitch takes place July 23-25.

International Justice Central - IJ Central

2008-06-03T12:34:00Z

I’m immersed at the BAVC Producer’s Institute for New Media, a 10-day think tank where 9 teams of documentary producers, video editors and multimedia developers get together to create projects that seek to extend the reach of social issue documentaries in new media spaces. Our team will propose an outreach tool we’re calling International Justice Central, or IJ Central, that will be centered on a “live” interactive map we’re designing to be overlaid on Google map technology, and will include…

1. All the locations where the ICC is operating in the world, such as its open cases in Uganda, DRC, Sudan, Central African Republic, and places it is monitoring like Colombia and Afghanistan. Also the headquarters in The Hague and the UN Security Council. The user of the map will be able to click on any of these locations and get a pop-up with more information about the cases or situations, or details about the Court in The Hague and the UN Security Council ICC briefings, incorporating characters from The Reckoning appearing in HD video we’ve shot over the past 2 years.

2. The map will receive real time text messaging pop-ups from cellphone social networks based on Twitter software that we will foster with activists and human rights defenders we’ve met in locations like northern Uganda, DRC, and Colombia, where cellphones are the most ubiquitous communication technology. Text messages from members of these networks will appear on the map at their geographical locations, giving voice to concerns, thoughts and sometimes urgent messages of people on the ground in the situation countries. For an example of a map receiving real time cellphone text messages, go to: http://twittervision.com/

3. The map will receive live news feed pop-ups related to international justice as the stories are posted. For an example of a live news map see: http://next.yahoo.net/download/newsglobe/index.html

4. The map will show all the countries that have joined the ICC and those that haven’t. It will also locate the NGOs that are working to promote the international justice system.

5. By entering your zip code, the map will show a pop-up of your congressperson/senator and their position vis-a-vis the ICC, and link to an email form addressed to the congressperson/senator to advocate for US ratification of the ICC.

6. A separate layer of the map would show locations of all other international justice activities around the world, such as the ICTY, the ICTR, the SCSL, Extraordinary Chambers in Cambodia, Inter-American Court, the Audiencia Nacional in Spain, the Fujimori trial, TRCs, and so forth, giving a comprehensive picture of the international justice movement.

the enduring role of radio

2008-06-01T14:07:00Z

In all the explorations of new media tools for outreach, let’s not overlook the role of radio and its enduring potential for interactive engagement with audiences, as we saw while filming for The Reckoning in Bunia in the Ituri region of eastern DRC. While there we met…

the dynamic Richard Pituwa, who runs Canal Revelation, a radio station that has become a crucial forum for talking about justice through “Interactive Radio for Justice”, a program he produces with the irrepressible human rights activist Wanda Hall. Bunia has no newspapers, and electricity is so sporadic that TV is not a strong medium, but radios run on batteries and are ubiquitous, so radio is far and away the dominant source of information in the region. People call in all day long on their cellphones, and we filmed a fascinating program they hosted with ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo

from engagement to political impact

2008-06-01T13:35:00Z

If we succeed in engaging audiences, how do we move them from engagement to building a movement for international justice and exerting pressure on policy makers?

I attended a panel in San Francisco yesterday called Sourcing the Future: Marketing and Sustainability for Social Justice Media Online where we heard lots of ideas on how to increase the visibility of a documentary project, thinking of it more as content than programming, getting users to spread your work through social networks, the usual head-scratching about monetizing social issue work, and so forth, but I was left with this enduring question: how do we take someone who has become engaged with an issue and move them to political action? With some issues you can make individual changes in your lifestyle that can impact the larger picture, like the food you eat, the car you drive, etc. But other issues require collective action and political pressure. The Reckoning will raise public awareness about the ICC - from that point, how can we get the US to engage with the Court and ratify the Rome Statute? It’s going to require political pressure - if we succeed in engaging the public, we’ll have to go the next step and organize those engaged people to help us educate and press policy makers to support this important new Court. Beyond all the online tools we can bring to bear, we also need to bring people together offline. We should definitely offer screening kits to build on what AIUSA has been doing with the film we made for them, Justice Without Borders, so that people can get together around the issue and meet each other, and hopefully create nodes of engaged citizens around the country to get behind the ICC.

mobile phone social networks

2008-05-31T13:57:00Z

New tools are emerging for advocacy and social networking with text messages on mobile phones…

I just started a ten day total immersion seminar at the BAVC Producer’s Institute, a kind of high-tech think tank to develop ideas to move beyond established methods of distribution and look for ways to reach out and energize and grow our audiences through social networks, to visualize the issues through interactive mapping and gaming, and ultimately to get citizens to engage and act on the issues.

Because The Reckoning is a documentary about the global reach and effects of the International Criminal Court (ICC), I’m intrigued by the idea of making a live interactive earth map that not only shows you what the ICC is and where it operates by incorporating embedded video we’ve shot and text, but also receives news feeds and mobile phone text messages in real time. After 2 years of filming with amazing people in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Colombia, it’s clear that mobile phones would be the best way to keep hearing from them and share their insights into the struggle for justice and the defense of human rights. This was reinforced for me when I received a call at 3am, a few hours before the start of the BAVCPI, from Dennis Lemoyi, leader of the Pagak IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camp in northern Uganda and a major character in our film - he was calling me on his mobile phone, of course, and had no idea where I was in the world or what time zone I was in - but my first thought was that his call augured well for our 10-day meet. And sure enough, by the end of the day, video compression guru Andy Beach showed us an amazing new online map, TwitterVision (http://twittervision.com/) that receives live text uplinks from members of Twitter mobile phone networks, showing their location on the map. So first day in, and one of my big questions was answered - how to maintain live contact with people on the ground in the situation countries. Apparently we’ll be able to adjust our map so that the Twitter feed is specific to the social network we create around international justice. So I can imagine a network made up of people like Dennis Lemoyi and other amazing voices from the field, sharing their thoughts and sending their text messages up to the map. Now we have to find a mobile phone maker or carrier to sponsor the SMS use for members of our network.

The Reckoning at the Rome Statute X Anniversary

2008-05-19T13:09:00Z

On July 17, 2008, we will be presenting 30 minutes of scenes from The Reckoning at the UN, during the celebration of the X Anniversary of the signing of the Rome Statute at Dag Hammarskjold Auditorium.

Welcome to The Reckoning outreach & engagement campaign forum

2008-05-18T14:42:00Z

Greetings and thanks again to all of you who attended the outreach summit for The Reckoning on April 3, and for those of you who weren’t able to attend, we hope that you will join us now online. For instructions on how to access the forum, please click on the “read more” link.

Skylight Social Media and ICTJ Productions invite all of you to participate in this forum that we’ve set up in order to keep the conversation going about how to create a far-reaching and high-impact campaign around The Reckoning to increase public awareness and support for the ICC.

If you click on the discussion section or on any of the discussion tags to the left, you will be asked to register and log in, as this conversation won’t be open to the general public because we want to keep it manageable. Feel free to weigh in on any of the discussion topics – we welcome all constructive criticism and brilliant ideas! We hope that this online dialogue will help us all create a landmark outreach/engagement campaign and break new ground in the use of documentary film for effective advocacy.

If you have any questions about how to use the site please don’t hesitate to .

The Reckoning 25-minute sample footage reel

2008-05-17T15:01:00Z

The footage sample at the top of this page includes scenes filmed in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Colombia, The Hague ICC headquarters, and the UN Security Council. This is the same sample we screened at the April 3 outreach summit, and we posted the footage in order to inform the forum discussions. It is important to remember when looking at this footage that we are in the early stages of editing and these scenes will not necessarily appear in the film as you see them here. Nevertheless, these are themes we’re exploring for The Reckoning and we welcome your feedback.