Strategies of Representing the Pain of Others: The Video Advocacy Institute

Abstract

Imagine bringing 30 human rights activists together with experienced advocacy trainers, faculty, and students to meet this challenge. For the second year in a row, human rights activists from around the world came together in the summer of 2008 to take part in the Video Advocacy Institute (VAI) at Concordia University. The VAI is the brainchild of Witness (www.witness.org), a non-profit organization with 16 years of experience in advocacy filmmaking. Having estabIished in-depth partnerships with several human rights organizations in one-onone training contexts, Witness developed the VAI to expand its reach and to create unique networking opportunities among activists. As colleagues within Concordia University's Department of Communication Studies and founding researchers of the Concordia Documentary Centre (www.documentaryconcordia.org/), we saw participation with Witness in this initiative as a unique opportunity to further develop such a practice of participatory research/creation in our ongoing collaboration with Witness. The VAI provided a truly unique opportunity for us as researchers/instructors to integrate theory, praxis, and critical pedagogy. Other participants, like Laura Pilar Sanchez, had previous experience making videos. Sanchez was not only participating in the VAI but also observing how to repeat the pedagogical experience once she returned to Mexico. Sanchez works with the Project for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (http://www.prodesc .org.mx). She came to the VAI to develop an advocacy video in connection with a campaign to defend Mexican communities against transnational corporations and their mining practices. Her group is involved with both national and international political advocacy projects, and she has found that video advocacy helps to visualize the impacts of transnational companies, connect communities across Mexico, and move people to action. Comparing approaches and strengthening regional and international networks is as essential part of the VAI experience. (Excerpts of video interviews with [Kamanda] and Sanchez, as well as other VAI participants, are available here: http://hub.witness.org/en/share/groups/group/4165.) Participants partake in the VAI as representatives of their grassroots organizations and come prepared to learn both advocacy and filmmaking. Many participants, like Sanchez, are also observing how to replicate this training for the rest of their staff. The official Witness motto is See it, Film it, Change it, and what the VAI adds to this important equation is Share it. To ensure the success of the video advocacy projects developed at the VAI, and to increase opportunities to replicate the training, the VAI provides participants with teaching resources as well as a digital camera kit.2 In 2008, for the first time the VAI also connected each participant to a respective professional filmmaker mentor whom participants could contact after the institute was over.