Ithaca College

Patricia Zimmermann, Professor of Screen Studies and Codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival presented at the World Premiere of We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Cinema at Lightbox Cinema in Philadelphia on October 1, 2019.

We Tell: 50 Years of Participatory Community Media, a national traveling exhibition, chronicles the hidden histories of place-based documentaries that situate their collaborative practices in specific locales, communities, and needs for social and political change.

Entailing five years of research, curating, and writing, Zimmermann coprogrammed this exhibition with Louis Massiah, Executive Director of Scribe Video Center, with archival, restoration, and preservation support from the XFR Collective. ​The exhibition is supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, and the Independence Fund.

Participatory community media represents a unique form of short documentary practice produced with communities and the subjects engaged in decision-making and representation. These works embrace and enhance the micro rather than the macro, shifting discourse and debate from the national to the local.

Rather than one auteur with a single vision, subjects and communities share authorship. Rather than parachuting into a place during a crisis, these works emerge out of spaces confronting urgent unresolved issues that have a direct impact on communities. 

These works envision documentary practice as a way to generate dialogues.