Friday, June 30th

The "Rescue" Dilemma
This fall, some months ago, I threw my two cents into a discussion about the issues the documentary "Born into Brothels," raised for the youth media field. In this well known documentary British-born photojournalist Zana Briski immerses herself into an impoverished and illegal neighborhood in Calcutta, India. Briski befriends the children of Sonagachi (the city's red light district), starts a photography workshop for them and equips them with cameras. As the kids grow with their new found art, the filmmakers struggle to help them.

You can see what other people who have handed cameras to kids say on the Youth Media Reporter site.

As one respondent wrote "anyone who has worked with young people at the 'sharp-end' of life will know how easy it is to become embrolled into thinking we can 'save' them. And a harsh and necessary voice wrote, "Zena'a (the film maker) racist behaviour is masked by her liberal white guilt." While another wrote "I don't think you throw out the baby with the bathwater: meaning, yes, we need to fight to end poverty, racism and sexual exploitation of women in India and throughout the world. But that's a tall order to wipe out thousands of years of oppression. Meanwhile, do we leave kids to languish in despair for a larger cause?"

Here is what I added:
Last week I ambivalently joined Netflix (unsure what it will do to small less "popular" documentaries and the use of media with educational audiences and as an activist tool) and put this movie at the top of the list. I bookmarked Ken's article and was glad to read it after seeing the film, which made me rather uncomfortable. I wish the movie could have raised, within it some of these issues this discussion is raising so well. I've spent a lot of time doing video and photography with teens in Los Angeles and Alaska. I too am a white artist who, as an Alaska Native activist I worked with told me pointedly and often, comes from resources. I’ve also worked in an Alaskan village and had a non-Native school superintendent say something to me like “don’t think anything you do with these kids will change their lives…they will never leave this village.” I guess I never thought I’d save the kids, push them to go to Stanford or Yale, or run for president, but I watched the students see their own potential and see that they had a voice. They taught me a lot too and so did their families. How to evaluate the results (another issue that youth workers and project coordinators run into) I’m not sure, but the dialogue about doing this work needs to continue. Documentaries like "Born into Brothels" are something more of the so called mainstream gets to see, or the folks who go might watch this film in a theater or rent it from Netflix. So a film like this could be a tool to raise awareness that can perhaps provoke people to change their personal behavior and challenge their government. I don’t think it was crafted or distributed in a way to do this, but it could have been.

06.30.06 @ 19:06PST

From Walmart to Banana Slugs and Brown Bears
Walmart announces they're selling "organic" foods. The epidemic of diabetes and obesity threaten the longevity of the next generation. Scan the reviews, check the new releases and top sellers and you'll find books critiquing the food industry and exploring ethical eating and eating close to home. Open Arms is a film (in progress) about making sense of what is on your dinner plate and how it got there with a twist. Here's the angle: modern women in the Alaskan wilderness taking part in an ancient food chain stalking wild deer, goat and caribou to put clean, local, safe meat on their families' tables.

That's the latest intro on the latest version of a proposal for a documentary film, Open Arms.
In preparation for continuing this film, I went for a two or so hour hike this morning on Gavan Mountain. After all, these women hunting are not only able and willing to use guns, but they are athletic and fit. Hunting in the Alaskan wilderness is no matter of drive by shooting (ouch). I on the other hand, have to admit to a bookish and film watching tendency and a real need to be provoked to "exercise." So the unfunded project got me out the door into the foggy moist morning. However, if I was following the hunters, I might not have stopped to look closely at an albino banana slug, a curious red squirrel and what might have been a red-breasted sapsucker. I'm no naturalist, no bird watcher, I just want to live deeply in the place that goes in the address slot on film proposals, tax forms and what seems like for now, the occasional invoice for work for others. Furthermore, what I see out the window, where that slug is and the mail comes, is in or minutes away from the Tongass, the largest, most untouched national forest in the United States. We live here on an island where there also may be between 2,000 to 4,000 brown bears.

I also want to keep making films that provoke thought, trigger discussion and help me and perhaps a few others make sense of the world (I'm writing that because some moments I'm not so sure). "You'd say you were on the lower end of commercial spectrum?" a U.S. Forest Service Rep asks. "Yes," I say, happy that the Forest Service sees this project as away to give off a positive message about using and respecting the wilderness versus a high budget film shooting in the woods. No, my crew won't be creating a set, doing pyrotechnics or making much of an impact. In fact my characters don’t give me a chance to reshoot, or ask for another take either. And I've always felt uncertain, a kind of ambivalence about filming in the wild. It seems bigger than the frame, more awe inspiring, and multi-dimensional than I can do justice to. I feel content, but small in the wild. Somehow when I was busy doing street photography in Los Angeles, or in the heavily populated and deforested islands in the West Indies, I felt oddly more comfortable with a camera, more at home in the man made, human dominated environment. Or maybe for some odd reason it felt, at the time, more intense and less recreational. So once again, picking a project leads me and maybe a few viewers to shift a little and rethink.

06.30.06 @ 15:13PST