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April 1, 2008
IT'S NOT A MOVEMENT WITHOUT A MOVIE
New York City's activist and advocacy communities are putting themselves and their interests on video like never before.
City Limits
By Karen Loew
We thought that all you needed was a blog or two to become an official movement, but to make it to the big time, you gotta have a movie!
Videos made by grassroots documentarians – who often are not professional filmmakers – about local issues and aimed at raising consciousness have risen to a more prominent, even ubiquitous, place in city movements for social change.
Name a cause, and you'll find an advocacy video on the subject – or you'll find a few, or at least be told there’s one in the works. With the tools of video production more affordable and accessible than ever before, and more people reflexively turning to video for expression, New York City finds itself awash in a sea of video by the people, about their concerns, for the purpose of affecting the discourse. Some exhibit the craft and polish to earn the title “documentary,” or at least to be called a film. Others are rawer videos with lower production and editing values. Some is really just “footage.”
Hey, WE have a movie!
Isabel Hill, director of the acclaimed documentary “Brooklyn Matters,” which critiques Forest City Ratner’s mega-development plan for Atlantic Yards, considers herself a historian and urban planner first and a filmmaker second – but says she simply had to jump into the Atlantic Yards debate with a movie.
“I had to get cracking because I knew time was running out” in the second half of 2006, leading up to the city’s key decisions on the property, Hill said recently. “I wanted to have something out there for people to respond to – and it has been good.”
In a previous job as a film reviewer for an arts organization, “I realized [film] was a great way to present something – ideas and concepts,” she said.
Brooklyn Matters will be screening TONIGHT at:
Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School
357 Clermont Avenue, Brooklyn
Posted by lumi at April 1, 2008 5:30 AM