Democracy, journalism and film nights

It’s never been easier to complain about our politicians and our journalists – neither species has covered itself in glory over the last little while. The big challenge is what to do about the problems they leave unresolved – not least transitioners’ favourites of peak oil and climate change.

Rather than railing against the failures, it’s far more uplifting to investigate alternatives. This post describes some small-scale responses, ones I absolutely would encourage you to try at home. Many will be familiar, some you are probably doing already, their combination may be less so. In time, they raise the prospect of something truly powerful, a global network of reporters focused on the way we run our communities.

Since mid 2005, home for me has been southwest France, an hour or so by road south of Toulouse, near a village called Montbrun Bocage. It is a rural area in the foothills of the Pyrenees, with small-scale sheep and beef rearing interspersed with light industry and tourism. The population is a mix of long-term locals, incomers from elsewhere in France and foreigners such as myself.

The village square of Montbrun Bocage in SW France

For all its Frenchness, the place is not so different from my native northern Scotland or anywhere else. The political and social challenges are the same ones that play out across the Western world and much of the rest of the planet. They include unemployment, education, housing, access to land, the high cost of transport and finding decent quality food. Peak oil and climate change are certainly on people’s radars though not as much as more immediate questions of how to earn a living or this year’s presidential elections.

I moved there with my family having fled a salaried post as a news reporter. I’d wangled a redundancy cheque having grown frustrated with not being able to do a decent job of covering issues such as climate change, globalisation and many other topics. So along with all the challenges of settling into a new country, I was determined to explore what an alternative form of journalism might look like.

This was where the film nights came in. Why not share the process of learning with other people? The French are very into their politics and talk about it a lot – there was no need to explain the rationale. So I began hosting regular screenings in the local village, scheduling them for the same day every month so as to get people into the habit of coming. The idea wasn’t original or complicated –Transition Town Totnes has been doing the exact same thing for a few years.

The screenings are free, beginning with shared food and concluding in debate after the films. The idea is to bring people together to learn about a topic and talk it over with others they may not have met before, stitching together a community that talks about politics.

What I liked about the idea was the opportunity it offered people to escape their TV screens for a bigger, shared one. I saw the screenings as the seed of an occasional TV channel, albeit one that broadcast only once a month. Wearing my journalist’s hat, it seemed logical to stretch the idea further, producing short films for the screenings instead of just importing other people’s ones all the time.

French protestors at the trial of GMO protestors

My background is in text journalism, I’d had just a bit of video training, so I got some help from an alternative TV friend in Toulouse. The result was a 7-1/2-minute film on the trials of protesters against Monsanto’s genetically modified maize. We screened it alongside a longer documentary on the same subject.

I put the film up on Youtube, where it had logged all of 2,000 views five years or so later. I liked the idea that our “local TV station” had a bigger audience than just the village.

One evening, themed on water, combined local reporting, publishing and politics. I screened a video I’d made on the ecology of water and sewage treatment along with a longer documentary about the politics of water. The audience, which included local councillors and the mayor, learnt and talked about water issues together.

It was a valuable exercise, preparing the ground for what will be expensive sanitation works due in our village in the coming years. The evening put down a marker for future debates and eventual public consultations over the work, including such taboo ideas of waterless composting toilets.

Screen shot from a short film examining our tricky relationship with water

Our use of water, and the politics and economics that govern it, is a universally relevant subject. Shooting the video gave the screening audience a bigger picture of the issue. It also provided a document for a wider francophone audience on the Internet.

This is public-interest journalism, reporting work that focuses on specific issues with the idea that we all have a right to determine how they are tackled. It explores alternatives to the obvious, to the status quo approach, finding authoritative figures with no political or monetary interest in specific outcomes and bringing their views to broad audiences.

As far as journalism is concerned, I know from experience the time, money and access barriers facing anyone who wants to learn how to do it. One answer is to run free video journalism workshops, in schools and the communities in which people live. We have done one so far in Montbrun, producing a short film of one day in the life of our community. While much of the content will remain local, it will still resonate with audiences elsewhere – politics is always politics.

Five or so years of regular monthly screenings have created all manner of bonds and connections between those who attend. It hints at possibilities for various future projects to be done together. Several professional film-makers have presented their work in person. The numbers attending have steadily grown over the years, reaching more than 50 on occasions in an area with a sparse and dispersed rural population.

It was with this in mind that I travelled to Totnes this week to attend the latest screening there - Michael Moore’s Capitalism - A Love Affair.

I also took the chance to demonstrate the potential of video journalism to Ben Brangwyn, co-founder of the Transition Network, using nothing more than a smart phone and a dodgy microphone. You can watch the outcome here.

This post has gone on long enough. There’s plenty more I’d like to say but I’m sure you’ve got other things to do. I hope to write more about collaborating with other transitioners in due course.

In the meantime, if you want to read more about democracy, journalism and how we might improve both you might want to check out my blog or my book Fraudcast News: How Bad Journalism Supports Our Bogus Democracies

Patrick Chalmers