Link to 2011 blog

Hello, again, everybody. If you are here looking for the 2011 blog, here’s a link.Thank you.

BaKaFORUM 2010: Until we meet again

ZKM Karlsruhe, Site of BaKaFORUM 2010

The idea of “cooperation in a world of cultural diversity,” a theme of this year’s BaKaFORUM, rises in relevance as we follow each day’s news. The films and presentations we watched in Karlsruhe offered hope, tempered by an honest appreciation of life’s challenges. Telling stories that matter continues to be a worthy way to contribute to–and also elevate–the daily reality of life in 2010.

Obviously, as BaKaFORUM 2010 becomes more distant in time, this blog will become less active. If you’re interested in more general comments and observations about the world of communication and culture, I invite you to visit my personal blog at http://irvseyeview.blogspot.com.

I also invite you to leave comments or to contact me by email, Facebook, or Linkedin.

It was a pleasure and privilege to meet you. Thank you and good bye for now.

Back home from BaKaFORUM

The trip home to California went smoothly.  Covering so much distance so fast is one of the technological wonders of our time. Accessible high-speed air transportation makes BaKaFORUM, and other world events possible. We often think of technology in terms of computers, cameras, and the tools of our craft. But the people at Airbus and Boeing. who design and build the planes,  and the pilots and staff who get us where we are gong truly use technology for our mutual benefit.

"Mediaculture" working at BaKaFORUM

The young people documenting BaKaFORUM as part of the Mediaculture online project are the future of what we do. They inherit a world filled with tensions, problems, and real danger, but also a sense of hope. Each generation faces different challenges and opportunities. Thank you to all the teachers and supporters who make programs like “Mediaculture” possible. Enjoy their work and wish them well.

The theme of “Cooperation in a World of Cultural Diversity” continues to resonate in ways obvious and profound. To say that BaKaFORUM is a truly egalitarian event would be an overstatement. But the suspension of every day roles is rich with potential. Possibilities for discovery grow when fledgling  producers and aspiring story tellers interact as peers with accomplished professionals, commissioning editors, and international decision makers. Pitching ideas and finding new talent can grow into creative accomplishment through the collegiality and good feelings of working together for a few days on neutral ground. This is most obvious in terms of the proposal pitches and the seeding of ideas that happened this week at ZKM in Karlsruhe. And for those of you who may have left without a partner for your project or new funding from your pitch, the process itself can help you grow.

There’s a true story about the manager of a young rock band who took his musicians for an audition to Decca Records in London, in the early 1960s. An executive heard them play but wasn’t too impressed; he said they were good but nothing special and passed on signing this aspiring group. This disappointed the band and their manager did not like telling them  the news. That  manager’s name was Brian Epstein and the group was the Beatles. The point of the story, of course, is don’t be discouraged if you’re  turned down. The flip side is if you’re commissioning or funding, look carefully at potential talent; you don’t want to be the one who passes on the next Federico Felini, Ingmar Bergman, Haile Gerima, or Spike Lee.

At a gathering of mass communicators–where we spend four days on interpersonal communication–friendships develop, alliances form, and creative communities begin to be born. Existing successful cooperative arrangements, such as Nordvision, offer models to grow in a world getting smaller through instant communication and fast jets. But the divide between rich and poor remains real. Political and cultural tension and hostility threaten our survival. BaKaFORUM cannot solve the problems of the world but it can help; it can start conversations and encourage dialogue.

BaKaFORUM Staff (Photo by Werner Laschinger)

I hope each of you had a safe and pleasant trip home. Your work ahead can serve the world by serving your community. Tell the stories that matter and enrich us all. Also, kudos to the BaKaFORUM staff whose superb work made it all possible.

Thank you, too, to  Werner Laschinger for taking so many fine photos; this link will allow you to view more of Werner’s pictures.

2010 BaKaFORUM Prize Winners (Updated)

The winners and nominees are listed below. For a bit more detail and some nice pictures click this link. It will take you to the BaKaFORUM.net page with results.

City of Karlsruhe Multimedia Prize (Tie)

•    Waterlife—National Film Board of Canada AWARD WINNER
•    Anaconda—UR/Sweden AWARD WINNER
•    Design Squad—PBS/United States

SRG SSR idée suisse Prize 2010—Adult Programming

•    Tiananmen–Westdeutscher Rundfunk/Germany
•    The Woman with the 5 Elephants—Mirafilm/Switzerland AWARD WINNER
•    Tying Your Own Shoes—National Film Board of Canada

•    HONORABLE MENTION:
El Sistema, EuroArts Music International GmbH, Germany

City of Basel Prize—Youth Programming

•    The Challenges of Our Time–DR/Denmark
•    Troubled Minds—Teachers’ TV/United Kingdom AWARD WINNER
•    Welcome Almost Everybody—UR/Sweden

Youth Jury Prize

•    Troubled Minds—Teachers’ TV/United Kingdom
•    Waterlife—The National Film Board of Canada
•    The Challenges of Our Time—DR/Denmark AWARD WINNER

The Proposal Prize

•    Mursi Me–Bruktawit Tigabu, Whiz Kids Workshop, Ethiopia AWARD WINNER
•    Shooting Cameras for Peace, RTVC, Colombia
•    SunChild TV,  FPWC, Armenia

Stay tuned

Hello, again, everybody. As we enter the final hours of BaKaFORUM I want  to thank you for sharing yourselves, your work, and enriching each other. Many of us go home soon, some very far away. In the days ahead, please check back on this blog. I will try to synthesize, in some meaningful way, impressions, lessons, and experiences from the last four days. With travel and a return to the daily realities of work and life there will be some gaps. But there is more to come. Also, please feel free to comment and interact; this too will enrich. Thank you, all.

A few thoughts on the last four days

COMMENTARY: Thank you to the organizers of BaKaFORUM. This has been an extraordinary four days, both hopeful and daunting. Hopeful, because we’ve seen stories that expose oppression and exploitation and others that celebrate triumphs of the human spirit. Daunting because the problems we face remain enormous in scope and diversity. Exposing problems doesn’t solve them, but it can help. And, like no time before “now,” technology allows wide access to tools storytellers can use to reach large audiences.

Sustainability is a “hot” topic in terms of the natural world. The pun is intended because the ecology of media also is changing dramatically. The“cool” medium of TV remains important because of its wide availability to viewers and role as the economic engine that powers other media in legacy organizations. In countries with histories of generous support for public broadcasting, the shift in emphasis to public “media” signals the inevitable change that new technology requires. We are somewhere in the middle of a dramatic transformation. The new ecology requires professional communicators, producers, storytellers, to find a place for the grassroots storytellers.

In my former work life as a TV news executive “convergence” became a buzz word in the mid 1990s. I’m happy to report I have not once heard the word used here. But be careful that the convergence fallacy is not just being called something else. That is to say, the imperative to cross platforms really needs to be understood beyond the idea of just repurposing content. Obviously, there are many here at BaKaFORUM who understand this, with great sophistication, and have found ways to cross platforms effectively. For example, Connecting People Across Conflict Borders, a French Web based production about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began on the Internet and was later produced as a TV doc.  We should also not forget that the large screen hi-def, 16:9 format, conveys a different message from the one we get on an iPhone. Younger colleagues seem to know this intuitively.

With all the material available at our fingertips, on YouTube, much of it is not worth watching; yet we remain fascinated with the instant availability of what we do want to see. Legacy “broadcasters” and creative entrepreneurs have an opportunity to tame the elephant in the middle of the room, if they can use the meaningful content on YouTube by serving as an effective gatekeeper and guide. The elephant I refer to is a sustainable economic model to support outstanding story telling. We saw two approaches to this at BaKaFORUM, in terms of helping navigate educational content with EduTube and EduTube Plus.

In certain areas of the USA–and probably elsewhere that I don’t know about–new partnerships between grassroots producers and established media are developing in daily journalism. I recently attended the Journalism That Matters (JTM) conference in Seattle, on the campus of the University of Washington. JTM brought together legacy news organizations, print and broadcast, with hyper-local entrepreneurial websites and blogs. The best local websites gain credibility by being connected to legacy media. The legacy partner gets the heartfelt local connection that coming from within a community provides. And as we’ve seen at BaKaFORUM–it’s about connecting and cooperation.

Contest finalists announced

Here are the BaKaFORUM entries selected as finalists. The award recipients will be announced at 20:00 (8:00 PM), in Karlsruhe.

City of Karlsruhe Multimedia Prize

• Waterlife—National Film Board of Canada

• Anaconda—UR/Sweden

• Design Squad—PBS/United States

SRG SSR idée suisse Prize 2010

—Adult Programming

• Tiananmen–Westdeutscher Rundfunk/Germany

• The Woman with the 5 Elephants—Mirafilm/Switzerland

• Tying Your Own Shoes—National Film Board of Canada

City of Basel Prize—Youth Programming

• The Challenges of Our Time–DR/Denmark

• Troubled Minds—Teachers’ TV/United Kingdom

• Welcome Almost Everybody—UR/Sweden

Youth Jury

• Troubled Minds—Teachers’ TV/United Kingdom

• Waterlife—The National Film Board of Canada

• The Challenges of Our Time—DR/Denmark

Quick takes

Take 1-

Sunday was another busy day at BaKaFORUM with many meaningful presentations and screenings. The afternoon sessions covered exciting approaches to the cross media universe. For a short take on some earlier thoughts on what I, and a few others, call the new media ecology check out an item on my personal blog I wrote a couple of weeks ago (you’ll have to scroll down till you find the BaKaFORUM logo). More on the discussions at BaKaFORUM in later updates.

Take 2-

Item 7 @ BaKaFORUM

Sessions manager Jan-Willem Bult is actively tweeting so if you want shorter takes on what’s happening follow him on Twitter at JWB_9. Jan-Willem posted a clip he recorded at last night’s Item 7 show. It’s on YouTube, and also embedded at the bottom of this page.

Take 3-

As just mentioned, the day ended with live Afro-Hip Hop/Nu Soul music by  Item 7. Werner Laschinger will have pictures up on his website later this morning. Just about everyone in the room wound up dancing!

Take 4-

Don’t forget to come to the ZKM_Kubus at 14:00 to find out which contest entries were selected as finalists. You’ll also be able to see clips at that time. It’s a great preview for the awards presentation at 20:00, preceded, of course by “Apertif” hour at 19:00.

Take 6-

Jump in; join the conversation; leave your comments! Thanks.

Watching Teza

Back in film school, some 40 years ago, we learned many things. One simple lesson came to mind as I watched Teza last night at BaKaFORUM. Teza is an extraordinary film; it follows an Ethiopian intellectual as he travels back and forth between his homeland and Germany where he studied science and medicine, beginning in the 1970s. Teza is not a documentary. It is a powerful dramatic feature that uses a highly stylized narrative approach to tell a story of violence, oppression, racism, and ultimately hope. You can go to the film’s website for more about it or click these links for two reviews and a news item about an award. As tempted as I am to write my own review, which would be quite favorable, I will leave that to others. Rather, I’d like to get back to that lesson from film school and a few personal reflections on the power of this movie.

That old film school lesson–really just a professor’s passing comment–was to remember to turn your back on the screen at some point during every movie you watch; observe how the audience reacts to the film. When I did this last night, the consistency of the audience’s engagement was striking. The faces in the crowd were transfixed as they watched the images on the screen. My subjective impression was that different viewers experienced shock, sadness, anger, and certainly empathy. Later, during the discussion of the film, one commenter confirmed these observations. He said that he is rarely moved emotionally to the extent this film moved him. My own emotional reaction was also quite intense. The film succeeds by its  ability to convey very powerful ideas in accessible fashion, with emotional emphasis.

The powerful ideas to which I’m referring relate to the insidious nature of cycles of oppression. Paulo Freire discusses this in the Pedagogy of the  Oppressed, his classic text on education and colonialist exploitation of native peoples. Freire was Brazilian but some of his ideas would seem to apply to Africa. Freire recognized how oppressors are oppressed themselves. Freire brought a Marxist orientation to his work. In TEZA, filmmaker Haile Gerima, in my view goes beyond ordinary understanding of “isms.” He recognizes that whether you call yourself a Marxist or come from a colonial or imperial power base, oppression is about human exploitation and the use of violent means for taking  power. The challenge is to break the cycles of oppression, something Gerima addresses through myth and his unique story telling craft.

I am not an expert on Freire but I studied his work a few years ago. So if you’re reading this and have something to add, please comment.

As for the film’s stylized narrative approach, you may spend the first part of the movie finding your way with its unique manner of story telling. I did and a few others I talked to had a similar experience. Much like a great book where you spend the first 50 or 60 pages getting into the rhythm of the writing, this film is well worth adapting your viewing to the rhythm and style in the opening scenes.

After the screening, Mr. Gerima took questions, along with his director of photography, Mario Masini, and actress Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur. It was an informative session, but I believe the panel’s moderator, Michael Koechlin, set the proper tone by saying that after a movie as powerful as Teza, a bit of silence and a long walk would also be appropriate. Thank you to all who created Teza, and brought it to us at BaKaFORUM.

“Every picture tells a story, don’t it?”

The grammatically challenged rip-off of an old Rod Stewart album’s title track seemed like a good way to begin…  this quick morning edition of the blog is almost all pictures. Photographer Werner Laschinger has been capturing images of BaKaFORUM for the last few days; these are just of few of his photos. More pictures are up now on Werner’s website. But here’s a preview edition of Werner’s pictures from the first two days of BaKaFORUM.