Audience Mobilization: New Approaches to Documentary Film Engagement
October 2019
Abstract of paper presented at Literary and Cultural Discourses on Mobility, a workshop hosted by University of Göttingen, Germany, by Mark Terry.
Abstract
The documentary film has long served as an effective and influential communications tool for speaking truth to power. Activists have used this medium of storytelling for years to mobilize audiences of the general public to take action and demand progressive social change. While this process has been in wide use for quite some time, evidence of its effectiveness is rare. In those few cases where a documentary film is credited with directly influencing change, it is usually when the audience of the film is not the general public, but those with the power to enact the change.
This paper will explore two new approaches to documentary film engagement designed to facilitate and accelerate the activist intentions of the social change documentarian. The first examines a new process of collaboration that involves the changemaker prior to and during production, not only after as is currently the common practice. The second is a form and structure of the documentary film designed with community representation, global perspectives, and the international policymaker in mind.
This new form is called the Geo-Doc, a multilinear, interactive, database documentary film project presented on a platform of a Geographic Information System map of the world. This digital configuration mobilizes the changemaker at all stages of production to ensure the data and visible evidence required for progressive new policy is made available.
The result is a collaborative documentary form that makes a direct connection between filmmaker and changemaker in the social change process through new approaches to audience mobilization.
Themes |
Planetary Health |
Status |
Active |
Related Work |
Documentary Film World | Project, Research
Youth Climate Report | Project, Research Planetary Health Film Lab | Education, Project, Research |
Updates |
N/A
|
You may also be interested in...
Student Opportunity: Communications Assistant
JOBID7573 Eligibility Requirements: sfs.yorku.ca/work-study-programs Rate: $14/hour Hours: Up to 10 hours/week Start and End date: asap – April 24, 2020 Application close...Read more about this Post
Assessment of COVID-19 Reporting Discrepancy in Bangladesh
Reporting discrepancies between officially confirmed COVID-19 death counts and unreported COVID-19–like illness (CLI) death counts have been evident across the...Read more about this Post
Publication – Climate Change-Accelerated Ocean Biodiversity Loss & Associated Planetary Health Impacts
Dahdaleh Institute researchers Byomkesh Talukder, Nilanjana Ganguli, and James Orbinski have published this review article with other co-authors in The...Read more about this Post