CASE STUDY
Documenting justice ENGAGING YOUNG FILMMAKERS IN NONFICTION STORYTELLING.
I
by MARGARET FINAN
t wasn’t until 2012, conducting research in South Africa on the role of documentary filmmaking in bottom-up development, that Palika Makam fully recognized the potential impact of youth-led social activism. A master’s candidate in The New School’s international relations program, Makam and two fellow students piloted a workshop on the outskirts of Cape Town. The workshop, Amazwi Wethu—“Our Voices” in Xhosa— taught five local students the documentary making process, from story generation to post-production methods of media engagement. Not long after the workshop’s completion, a nearby town brought its school district to court in a human rights case, citing a gross lack of educational materials and professional protocols. When Makam saw an Amazwi Wethu studentproduced film posed as a basis for the case—which went on to successfully establish minimum norms and standards in the community’s educational infrastructure—she knew she wanted to continue the work upon her return to New York. With a B.A. in journalism, 25-year-old Makam expected to pursue a career in international reporting, but an introduction to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed turned her passion for storytelling on its head. Makam soon opted to pass the camera to a story’s stakeholders, rather than filter it through an outsider’s lens. The Babel Project, the non-profit Makam co-founded with Carlos Cagin and Jordan Clark in 2013, is moored in documentary filmmaking, a reporting platform that maintains space for the nuance of personal narrative. At its heart, the Babel Project is an organization deeply concerned with social justice, employing filmmaking and digital media literacy as a vehicle to socially engaged, critically thinking youth, whose passions echo far beyond the nearby city limits. From the GO Project, which provides support to lowincome New York City public school elementary students, to Telluride Mountain School in Colorado, for which the Babel Project facilitated an eighth-grade documentary project on regional energy production and consumption, the Babel Project works with a range of educational partners in 22 BCM 39
the U.S., while Amazwi Wethu continues in South Africa. Students learn computer literacy, interview skills, editing and production processes. Ultimately, Makam facilitates an extensive dialogue on the impact of production and the role of film in grassroots organizing. “Social activism used to have the old physical barriers to participation, being in a very radical space or on the ground marching,” says Makam. “That’s changed.” She often references a statement made by Chris Anderson, the current curator of TED conferences: “What Gutenberg did for writing, online video can now do for face-to-face communication.” Certainly, in the wake of a hyper-viral online video campaign like Kony 2012—however divisive its narrative— Anderson’s implication of a revolutionary shift in reach is difficult to dispute. Still, Makam argues, nothing beats face time. Whether tackling something as extensive as educational infrastructure or simply sharing what they enjoy about their neighborhoods, students are encouraged not to view their films as a stand-alone statement, but rather an entry point from which conversation with their community begins. “Too often, due to barriers of language or literacy or geography, or access to technology or education, there are certain voices left out of the conversation of global issues,” says Makam. For the Babel Project, whose name references the biblical story of miscommunication, visuals stand as a universal language, capable of eliciting empathy and connection even where words fail. Whether in South Africa or New York, the goal is the same: to foster socially conscious storytellers, global citizens who are confident in the power of their own voices to enact change. “It’s a personal shift you can see over the process of production, where even someone who’s shy or feels misunderstood assumes the ability to showcase a part of their lives that they might not otherwise have the space to. At the end of the day,” says Makam, “that’s the real value in this work.”