We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media
In a conversation moderated by ODL Founder & Principal Investigator William Uricchio, Louis Massiah and Patricia Zimmerman will discuss We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media, a traveling exhibition co-programmed by Massiah and Zimmerman that chronicles the hidden histories of place-based documentaries that arise from specific locales, communities, and needs for social and political change. Participatory community media is a unique form of documentary practice produced in collaboration with communities and subjects. These works emerge out of places confronting urgent issues, involving collaboration, negotiation, and a shared vision, allowing communities to render their own analysis of the world. Media becomes a tool for essential democratic discourse, change, and a way to confront power. We Tell features forty-one separate media projects, thirty-six different production entities, and work from nineteen states and Puerto Rico, and will be presented by ODL as a virtual screening series in April and May (register: bit.ly/wetellmit).
Louis Massiah is a documentary filmmaker and the founder of the Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, a media arts center that provides production workshops to community groups and emerging independent media makers. As an educator and institution builder, Massiah has developed media production methodologies that assist first time makers author their own stories.
Patricia R. Zimmermann is Professor of Screen Studies and Co-Director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival at Ithaca College. Her most recent books include Flash Flaherty: Tales from a Film Seminar (2021); Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics (2019); and Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice (2018).
Our lecture series is made possible by generous support from the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, and MIT Transmedia Storytelling Initiativ
