TheJakartaPost

Please Update your browser

Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.

Jakarta Post

Filming social changes

Change for the better: The US-born Global Social Change Film Festival and institute was held in Ubud, Bali last week

Trisha Sertori (The Jakarta Post)
Ubud
Thu, April 21, 2011

Share This Article

Change Size

Filming social changes

C

span class="inline inline-center">Change for the better: The US-born Global Social Change Film Festival and institute was held in Ubud, Bali last week. The festival will be held across the world with the GSCFFI in New Orleans in 2012.JP/J.B. Djwan

Calls for social change have been with us over the centuries; it is seen in history’s peasant uprisings, revolutions, suffragette demonstrations and freedom marches around the globe.

Indonesia has witnessed its fair share of demands for social change, from the rise in the late 1920s calling for the yoke of Dutch domination to be lifted to the dismantling of a dictatorial regime in 1998.

Getting the message of social change out in the past was word of mouth, written in subversive pamphlets or as in Indonesia, through village wayang (puppetry performances) delivering information of a people’s revolution under the noses of the Dutch colonists.

Last week’s inaugural Global Social Change Film Festival and Institute’s (GSCFFI) event in Ubud, Bali, continued this tradition of sharing information and raising conscious, but this time through the power of film that can reach millions of people around the world.

Director and founder of this festival without borders, Cynthia Phillips, said the festival’s theme, “Global Women and Film” honored female filmmakers, such as this years GSCFFI Honoree, Indonesian film maker Nia Dinata for her films that weave their way through the censor’s office to eventually offer glimpses into the lives of women in Indonesia.

GSCFFI’s 2011 theme also highlights the scarcity of women filmmakers globally, despite their making up half the world’s population.

More than 800 people attended the festival’s range of films, workshops and panels that raised awareness of the pressing issuers of the 21st century such as climate change, dispossession of lands, women’s rights and post civil war community reconciliations.

The festival went further than sharing messages through film — it opened doors to young filmmakers on the processes of film making, fund raising for films and their distribution to television and other outlets.

This knowledge transfer took place though a series of workshops headed up by experts in their fields, such as television’s Dee LaDuke and Mark Alton Brown who taught the techniques of taking an idea “without the money, infrastructure and delivery systems that studios and networks provide” from idea to television series.

The festival, supported by the Ford Foundation, Abigail Disney, Wendy Burgher and more, allowed young Indonesian filmmakers, such as Ahmud Yunus and Vicci Fatralaya from Watchdoc films in Jakarta and Papuan born Wensislaus Fatubun to join a four-day workshop with Oscar-nominated director Jonathan Stack through its GSCFFI Fellowship Program.

During the workshop 10 fellowship documentary filmmakers journeyed “through the complete process of making a documentary from initial story development to completed documentary,” writes Phillips in literature about the program of the Stack workshop.

“This workshop has been really valuable, we have learned a lot more about the technical aspects of film making and equipment,” says Yunus who recently completed a 10-month journey across 80 Indonesian islands on “a 100-cc motor bike,” filming people in isolated communities and the issues they face due to that isolation.

Fatubun, who has made a film of the military’s sandalwood trade out of Papua and its resulting HIV increase in local communities, says the festival and workshop offered “great experience to learn from a director like Jonathan Stack. He gave us new perspectives in filming,” says Fatubun.

Two films were screened each evening of the festival, with award for best of festival going to Sara Terry’s extraordinary film on the power of forgiveness, Fambul Tok (Family Talk).

Terry’s film follows the re-birth of a traditional way to reconcile families and communities in the aftermath of a brutal civil war in Sierra Leone. With just one million dollars Sierra Leone’s John Caulker helped 20,000 victims and 600 perpetrators of murder, rape and mutilation find apology and forgiveness so communities and families could be genuinely reconciled.

Terry’s film shows this grassroots ability to forgive even the most horrific crimes is, in Sierra Leone, far more successful than the Western model of Truth and Reconciliation tribunals that the film says in Sierra Leone has cost 200,000 million dollars over four years with just ten perpetrators brought to trial to date.

An aim of the film festival was to show that social issues and threats, such as climate change, can be shared through story telling, says Phillips, citing two films on climate change, Michael Nash’s Climate Refugees and Briar March’s There Once Was an Island.

Both films discuss the same subject using very different techniques; Nash’s film is heavy on hard facts such as the evidence of the world’s 25 million refugees of climate and weather pattern change and how climate change and its displacement of populations could be a tipping point into global wars and famines.

March’s film is more personal; based on the tiny island of Takku, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, we see the impact of climate change and rising sea levels on a small community whose homeland is soon to be under water.

“Story is critical,” says Phillips, “It brings us the human face of climate change and hopefully people can see what can be done to create a better world, to choose for themselves to become solution oriented. From the films I hope people become excited, engaged and then to take action,” says Phillips of the festival’s goals.

A doctor in agricultural economics, Phillips points out issues such as climate change are very real.

“People here [in Indonesia] get it [climate change]… They live with it daily. We in America do not have a concern on climate change. Films on this [subject] will be run on cable [not mainstream TV]. As an economist I do the models on climate change. The insurance companies are calculating the probabilities of climate change on their bottom line — so you can bet climate change is real,” says Phillips.

But as Phillips highlights, until social change films are more widely available for general viewing, too many of the public will remain uninformed of the disasters and successes taking place globally each day.

The GSCFFI will be held in New Orleans in 2012. There are also plans to for the film festival to revisit Indonesia in the same year.

{

Your Opinion Matters

Share your experiences, suggestions, and any issues you've encountered on The Jakarta Post. We're here to listen.

Enter at least 30 characters
0 / 30

Thank You

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. We appreciate your feedback.