Indigenous Peoples Summit Anchorage - Tuesday 2 PV Films

I've got a lot of video, but my computer is also full and I still don't trust my external hard drive, but I've been trashing old video so I can download new stuff. It's much easier to just write.

This evening I went back to the Denaina Center for the Summits film festival. I'm not sure what I expected, but I was really excited when I left. Basically, the films were all short films - up to about four or five minutes - made by the people in the films. There are some helpers. The UN has a whole program to help indigenous peoples make PVs (participatory videos) as a powerful way to tell their own stories. Two people who help people make such films - Citt (pronounced Kitt) Williams and Nick Lunch - were there to give some background. There were also some people who were in the films. (Nick's link goes to a video of Nick and his brother talking about making PVs.)

For this conference, the them was climate change, and most of the films showed us how climate change was affecting the lives of the people in the film. Films we saw covered a wide variety of locations:
Inuit Canada
Carterets Island - these people are being forced to move to the Papua New Guinea mainland by rising tides which is destroying their crops. The one hundred twenty families on the island are all preparing to leave their homes. Here's the video itself from Citt's blog on the site Media Studio. It's from her post yesterday from Anchorage.



Masai in Kenya - Drought is killing their livestock - you can see this film at Conversations with the Earth. Click on the video tab and the Masai.
Madagascar - drought is causing dunes to take over arable land. They are fighting back planting in the sand.
Borneo - A village where each family has ten plots. Each year they plant on one of those plots on a ten year rotation. They also protect the forests around them, while neighboring villages have had their forests cut by timber companies.
Camaroon - Looking at the loss of forest and the impacts that has on their culture. This film was their first film and made just last week!
Australia - Discusses the problems of fires.
Madagascar - Here an older woman teaches a younger woman about sorghum.
Peru - This film was different from the others. It is a more traditional documentary with a God-like narrator discussing how the glaciers are melting and other issues.
Australia - Two more Australian ones. People from both these films were in the audience and spoke to the group. Below is a bit of video I took of the first one and the woman from that movie. I'll try to add another one with the other guys who were here after the movie. But I'll do that later.



This was really good stuff. I realized that this is what I was starting to do in Thailand. But I was thinking that the videos were not really my job, just something I was doing on the side. But clearly next time I could focus on the sort of work that produced these videos of people telling their own stories. It was good to be able to talk to Nick and Citt afterward.