Indy media legacy documents Genoa G8 police violence

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNMAhN6PwAE&w=560&h=315]

 

Carlo Augusto Bachschmidt, director of the documentary Black Block, explains how work by independent media helped piece together the story of unprovoked Italian police violence at the G8 2001 summit meeting in Genoa. (Italian with English interpretation).

His film features powerful testimonies by some of the dozens of activists who were savagely beaten by Italian police during a raid on the Diaz school at the G8 meeting. Lena, Niels, Chabi, Mina, Dan, Michael, and Muli recount in painful detail how they went from demonstrating in the streets to what they thought was a safe shelter for the night — the Diaz school on the outskirts of the northern Italian city of Genoa.

Each describes what they experienced that night and in the days that followed. Despite their trauma, the survivors have continued with their activism, in addition to suing the Italian police through the courts.

Bachschmidt says video and still images gathered by independent journalists in Genoa meant the facts of police brutality reached a wider public, painting a far more accurate picture of events than portrayed by the authorities or conventional media.

I did the interview with fellow independent journalist Glenn McMahon as part of visionOntv’s coverage of the Human Rights Watch Festival 2012 in London. He used an iPhone and iRig mic to shoot a no-edit video interview based on the visionOntv mobile phone interview template.

The idea is to do short videos that can be rapidly uploaded to the internet with minimal hassle, vastly increasing the chances of making media that gets seen. Just the sort of thing needed for covering the likes of the Genoa G8.