Mimi Chakarova talks about making “The Price of Sex”

Posted on

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q7w4v1rheA&w=560&h=315] Documentary film-maker and photojournalist Mimi Chakarova talks about her film, the Price of Sex, which screened in London this week as part of the Human Rights Watch Festival 2012. Chakarova describes how it took her four years to persuade some of the East European women who’d been sold into sex slavery to tell […]

Gonzo journalism? Sounds more like the brighter future to me

Posted on

I enjoyed this recent video interview by Tanya O’Carroll, a fellow volunteer at visionOntv, with mobile media maker and professional blogger Christian Payne. The man  talks great sense – I agree completely with his thinking about a future for journalism that includes the many citizen journalists in addition to the full-timers. Just the sort of […]

The bloody realities of self publishing

Posted on

Self-publishing is a grind. Don’t kid yourself that you can just kiss off that bestseller, throw it up on line as an eBook or paperback then lay back and count the royalty cheques as they roll in, particularly if you forgot to put in the teen vampires chapter. Here in the grunt room at Fraudcast News, […]

Uploading smartphone videos to multiple sites

Posted on

I have been volunteering with visionOntv for the last few weeks, helping out with their project to encourage the widest possible distribution of video for social change. That has involved me doing and learning ultra-light video shooting and publishing techniques that I hope to be able to share with other citizen journalists working to transform […]

Activist Video training in Bristol’s Stokes Croft

Posted on

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0bTIh5hqmo&w=420&h=315] I shot this brief, smartphone film this morning using a visionOntv video-making template, warming up for a day at the Bristol Radical Film Festival in Stokes Croft. This week-long event has a hoard of film treasures, meaning the 15 or so participants in today’s training workshop didn’t need any explanations about why our […]

Democracy, journalism and film nights

Posted on

It’s never been easier to complain about our politicians and our journalists – neither species has covered itself in glory over the last little while. The big challenge is what to do about all the problems they leave unresolved. Rather than railing against the failures, it’s far more uplifting to investigate alternatives. This post, which […]

No jobs, no money – ordinary Afghans pay the costs of war

Posted on

(Photo: Traditional market in Herat Afghanistan. 25-5-09 Copyright © Guy Smallman. All rights reserved.) I spent a fascinating evening in London on Thursday listening to two men who have stepped away from mainstream political thinking and policy on Britain’s military adventures in Afghanistan, both of them having experienced the place for themselves. The first was […]

Marrying revolution and transition – can it be done?

Posted on

These are two apparently very different films that I see as being totally on the same page. The first How to start a Revolution, is already out, garnering jury prizes at film festivals around the world. I haven’t seen it yet but I love the book on which it’s based, From Dictatorship to Democracy. It […]