Uneven Development: Listening to the 'South', Listening to Vancouver

Participatory Filmmaking YouTube Video

The video above features PV Sateesh, a professional filmmaker and advocate for participatory filmmaking. He describes his journey towards his involvement in this form of participation, and work with the Deccan Development Agency. His acknowledgement of the wide audience base that film can provide in India lead him to become so involved in participatory filmmaking. He sees film as a means of expression, an incredibly valuable tool for rural marginalized groups. He describes the women he works with as being marginalized through different aspects of their identities: through their identity as women, as poor and as illiterate. Being able to communicate visually and audibly is a tremendous tool that represents the power of expression and active participation. Sateesh mentions the ways in the women create their own language and symbolism. Their “slave shot” from above demonstrates a demeaning power structure, and their “eye level shot,” represents equality amongst the women. The women soon branched out from making films exclusively for their own villages, and decided to investigate Bt cotton in the global South through film. Their travels to South Africa, Thailand and Mali allowed the women to share the stories of the farmers they met whose lives are intimately touched by Bt cotton, and investigate the controversy deeply. Sateesh asserts that these women have created a horizontal space of debate and sharing.

The organization that provides these women with the means to express themselves through film is the Deccan Development Agency, a grassroots organization. It operates within seventy-five villages and sanghams for women, or voluntary local associations. The five hundred female members are impoverished, mostly illiterate, and many are also socially stigmatized due to the high population of dalits, whose class is at the bottom of the social hierarchy. The agency provides both technologies so that the women can create and edit their own films, as well technical support by training women in the use of the equipment and media. As of 1998, the women have made over 100 films that range from expressing the local need for childcare to various issues of the environment and biodiversity. The social effect this plan has had on the women has been enormous, as informal leadership positions have been created for them. The women have the power to not only express their own point of view, but those of the community in a straightforward way. The success of the participatory filmmaking has resulted in expansion into other forms of media to open up a dialogue:

“Their compelling statements on why they should have a media of their own are forcing the academic and development world to rethink media policies. The women have also established a Community FM Radio Facility, controlled and operated by themselves. Born from the collective aspiration of the women to own an alternative medium of expression the content and the form of which they can control, the DDS FM Radio is five years old and has canned nearly five hundred hours of programmes.”

A common issue in the participatory expression of priorities in a community is that of how to reach the illiterate in an understandable and meaningful way. The facilitators of survey, who may be leaders of development agencies or NGOs, have a great amount of power in their framing of questions and translation of results. When compared to the ranking of images representing needs of communities, or using maps chosen and fully understood by the facilitators, the ability to tell one’s own story through any number of narrative or artistic strategies is quite amazing and innovative. The women own and produce their stories, their strategies for expression, and have the ability to expand the audience from village to region, to even the world through the Internet. Through this, the women gain a sense of capability, confidence and ultimately the tools to participate in the foreground as opposed to a passive or instructed participation in their global communities. However, we should ask ourselves if viewers from the West posses the tools to understand what a subaltern expresses, even through an unorthodox medium. Do we need more cultural context? Can we escape our own cultural lenses? Are we still translating?