Patricia Zimmermann, Professor of Screen Studies and Codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, was a featured presenter at the August 18 Film Quarterly Webinar on We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media, the national touring exhibition coprogrammed by Zimmermann and Louis Massiah from Scribe Video.
The new word is co-creation.
But for decades, socially conscious documentaries were produced by groups of dedicated individuals working for change.
Film Quarterly mounted a webinar to investigate the history of political and socially engaged community documentary production, inspired by this landmark retrospective national touring exhibition.
Film Quarterly Editor in Chief B. Ruby Rich moderated a conversation extremely relevant for our perilous times of disruption of media systems, practices, and technologies. The webinar attracted a large national and international audience.
Panelists included Maggie Bowman, Kartemquin Films and International Documentary Association; Carmel Curtis, archivist at Indiana University and XFR Collective; Darcy McKinnon, New Orleans Video Access Center; Louis Messiah, Scribe Video Philadelphia; Spencer Nakasako, Vietnamese Youth Development Center; Angela Aguayo. University of Illinois; and Zimmermann.
Angela Aguayo reviewed We Tell for the current (Summer 2020) issue of Film Quarterly.
Her article "Documentary Resistance: The Stories of 'We Tell' as Collective Political Agency" can be found here:
https://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article-abstract/73/4/82/110630/Documentary-Resistance-The-Stories-of-We-Tell-as?redirectedFrom=fulltext
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20200914100920330