Khmer Rouge Trial

It was with mixed feelings that I recieved the news of the Khmer Rouge Trial beginning last week. Justice is value to which humanity must aspire but perhaps not without it’s own sense of pain of memory, trauma and loss of the irreplaceable.

In 2004 I spent quite a bit of time in the region and at the time wrote in an article published in the local paper, “It was Cambodia that stole my heart”. I remember being struck by the harmony of the place, mixed with a strong wiff of memory and dysfuntion. One day I spent hours playing with a group of gorgeous kids in a village after a day on the back of a motorbike. My driver invited me back to his home and before long there was a collection of dark curious eyes following me, playing cat and mouse behind my back before we tumbled into games of soccer, piggy back and shoulder rides, and crude lessons in photography with my camera. I sat for a breather for a cup of tea and a chat when the conversation lightly turned to the family members missing due to the genocide. It seemed to me that these facts were repeated tranfered in this manner with the many others who I spent time with along the way. These people were emotionally spent.

I also remember the feeling of vomit rising in my throat at the killing fields and Tuol Seng in particular.

Perhaps Cambodia was my entre to a need to explore the ghosts of trauma among survivors, how we heal and what aids the healing process. War crimes trial may be one way, Truth and Reconciliation Tribunals, Apologies, compensation, therapy. I don’t have answers to such questions, except what people have told me: speaking, being heard, being acknowledged, being supported, sharing pain and having a future.

These episodes move survivor groups to vow, “never again” but horrifically, as a global community we seem to watch the same story line replayed over and over again only with different characters, different locations. To this again all I can say is that I have no answer and that like everyone else, my eternal question is simply “why”.

Also read responses from Khmer people, News reports and a resource from Yale University

Bushfire horror

I feel I can’t write without some mention of the awful tragedy which has befallen my state of Victoria. Everyone knows someone who has been affected and in that respect we have all been affected. But even as I sit here to write I feel there are very few words to say.

At work we have struggled to find a way to describe the way we all feel: flat was the closest we came. But all week there have been snippets of news coming in. Some of it throws us back into sadness and depression; the loss of a home, a friend’s family. Other stories form the lifeblood that keeps us living and growing together as a community; the way a foster carer I know has spent her days and nights serving tea, coffee and snacks, colleuges who are volunteering through giving grief counselling to victims and families, not to mention the CFA.

And the question on all our lips, “How could this happen?” What would move someone to cause such devastation and how could such an illness go unnoticed and untreated? How could we be so poorly prepared after two hundred years of living on this country? What should we learn from this, or from our Indigenous brothers and sisters who have a level of sophisication in their knowledge of this kind of management that I can’t begin to grasp? What in the world can we do about it now.

It seems bad taste to think about what could have been done but I did hear an interesting interview on the radio which promoted the use of dug-outs which is attributed to saving many lives in the 1939 Black Friday fires. Certainly I would suggest it sounds like a far smarter idea than the fire-corridors suggested by Brumby. If there is one thing I believe strongly in it’s that we as inhabitants of this land must learn how to adapt to nature, not try to shape nature to fit in with us. Nature will always win that battle.

After the Year of the Slog: what my honours project taught me

Through my practice based research project I put forward the idea of Participatory Documentary Practice as an ethics based alternative practice and solution to problems associated with produce media about the other groups and communities- in this case, Indigenous and Jewish communities.

I tracked the approach throughout the project which included having two community co-producers who would guide me through cultural sensitivities and help me navigate community politics. Community co-producers would also be integral in working out how their story would be told, who should be interviewed and what types of questions should be asked. This practice comes from the perspective that producers should create a system where he/she is an employee of the participating communities, helping to tell their true and human stories.

What I found was not that there was anything intrinsically wrong with this approach- all participants felt strongly connected to what was produced- but rather the main finding was that it would be very difficult to adopt this approach in industry practice. Holding the interests of the communities we work with in priority place is a lovely idea and efforts towards this will certainly earn respect of everyone involved, allow greater trust and access and a deeper level of story telling, but the consequences of this come into sharp focus when deadlines come around. I was faced with a problem: either exert even more pressure to meet my deadline, or continue to wait for the right time by the communities involved for the interviews to take place after weeks of cancellations and availabilities.

But academic research loves problems and this aspect formed a major finding of the research.

Production of In the Wake of Genocide continues (an insightful interview was done yesterday) to expand on the 28 minute piece so we can anticipate that the full 52 minute feature will be fit for broadcast in the near future.

It’s not hard to see my own growth either. This project tested my ability to tackle production problems, to rethink my approaches to think creatively. It also fine-tuned my technical skill and matured me as a producer, my sensitivity to sound, structure and story.

Importantly, I have begun to feel comfortable in the idea of producing Indigenous stories. Being a white producer or journalist in this context can be scary and can attract questions of validity and rights. These questions are both internal and externally imposed and in fact, this is probably the reason for the whole research. But throughout the experience of producing In the Wake of Genocide I never once felt unwelcome or unwanted. Moreover, I was very supported (which is not to say I wasn’t tested!).I maintain that the participatory approach was significant in building the quality of these relationships.

In my own way I love my country, but I think we can do better than we have for the past 200 years. I’ve realised that I only began to feel some pride in being Australian since the Apology last year and since having the ability to recognise a shameful past and the courage to publicly admit our shortcomings. Using the participatory approach meant I had no choice but to  listen to what people were telling me and it meant all of us felt comfortable working to produce these stories which is vital for building a rich tapestry of media and stories.

Sharing the love

During post production of In the Wake of Genocide I was pointed in the direction of two fantastic resources for radio producers and to some extent for current affairs journalists too.

The first is the Free Sound Project which is an online community of soundFX collectors and sharers. Most of the content is quite good quality, is easy to search for especially with the user ratings, and .wav files or mp3s are available for download and use. All files will let you know what the copyright conditions are through creative commons.

The second is another creative commons community (like flikr and others) but this one is a community of music mixers. ccMixter is geared dj types who share samples, remix them and then upload them for the cycle to happen again. But that didn’t stop me from finding a huge range of tracks which perfectly suited my radio feature. There are loads of genres from french jazz to electronic to ambient and some very talented artists. Again all tracks will alert you to the copyright conditions which are generally not too much more complicated than attribution. All files are mp3.

I’ve added permalinks to my links category which you can always find at the bottom of the page.

Survive, Revive

I’m pleased to report that I survived the grueling conclusion to my Honours year. After taking the liberty of a wonderful summer break I’m back, blogging again and producing again.

I’m picking up after Honours finished in late 2008 with the Cooper tale- interviews planned this week. The story has certainly grown some legs though with The Age reporting the story Nov ‘08, followed by a hugely successful event at Parliament House (Melbourne) on December 2nd to commemorate William Cooper. I managed to collect some real gems from the night from a number of William Cooper’s descendants who had really interesting things to say so I’m really excited about cutting those together and seeing where it leads.

A half-hour documentary was produced and assessed for  Honours and, happily, it was well received  by the examiners. The goal for the coming weeks is to seel the deal with an hour program for radio and online.

Questions??????

At a meeting this morning with the two main participants in the project I’ll be asking many many questions, which I’ve nutted down to a few different sections:

• What are the aims of this project, what do you/we want to achieve out of it?
• Keeping in mind the limitations certain broadcast agreements can have, what would be the most comfortable approach to planning a broadcast? (ie: pre-sale commission, independant production)
• Who are we going to invite to be part of this project by way of contributing interviews? What sorts of questions should be be asking? How do we make sure we ask them in a culturally appropriate way?
• Explanations of the various protocols we need to be aware of
• Any ideas about musicians who might be interested in being involved?
• Discussion of ideas about the style of the piece

Busy meeting indeed!

Canadian Apology

Way across the other side of the world another historic apology has taken place. Reading through the comments its amazing to see the same sentiments being raised in response to a governmental apology to Aboriginal peoples for past injustices sanctioned by government policy. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise I suppose the similarities were quite startling for me to read. Even though of course I was very aware of similar kinds of histories elsewhere in the world, I found myself thinking, surely no one could have botched things up as much as we did, surely ours was a once off mistake?

In a way it would be comforting to think that Australia is the only nation struggling to grapple with the ugly elements of our past but of course we are just one of many.

Much to do

The next stage of the doco is not so much working out how the collaboration will work (I have a meeting next week to work out the final nuts and bolts with those involved) but more about the actual production choices, which is my major role as the producer (naturally).

Over the last week I have tried to work out what it will sound like. In Search of Edna Lavilla was recommended by my supervisor as an approach to consider. I really liked lots of aspects about this feature, there were really nice textures with the sunny side of the street being whistled and played throughout, the personal interviews and conversations with the mother as they discovered new parts of the story and especially conversations reading newspaper articles together. Also the court transcript reenactments weren’t as corny as I’d imagined.
But I think the thing that stood out for me in terms of techniques I could adapt was the way that the search for Edna’s grave was the thread throughout where snippets of the walk through the cemetery were returned to as a kind of transition from scene to scene.

The other documentary which was suggested was Fernando’s Ghost which was more of a historical reconstruction more in line with Hindsight type programs. It used a mix of historic transcripts and news articles and interviews with historians, as well as some soundscapes to build a sense of place. I really enjoyed this one too and certainly will take on how the historic interviews were woven into the story so that it had a sense of discovery.

I’ll talk about some of these ideas at the meeting next week and get down to some serious search for textures: newspaper articles, the actual protest letter, places, newsreels from reporting on the holocaust, newsreels about the missions, people alive who remember the time, especially people from Moroopna.

Fun!

Transient decisions

In the making of the online documentary I experienced quite a few technical limitations of my own knowledge. If I could have my wish list granted I would have changed the following:

• Roll over: sound plays, Roll off: Sound stops. As it is users have to be really careful in turning off the sounds by clicking before moving on to the next one, to make sure they don’t have overlapping sounds playing at the same time. Although I have included instructions and tips on the index page (and in blue to make sure they stand out) it doesn’t feel nice to have more than one voice in your head, especially when you have headphones on. Sort of like the programs that try to explain how schizophrenia feels. The other advantage that this set-up would have had would been that users could preview the sound without feeling trapped in it. I discussed in a previous post trying to add smaller bite-sized sounds that started playing on roll-over where the entire sound sequence would play on a click, but when I constructed this I was confronted by many more problems. Users no longer had the ability to stop the sound once started and there was a risk of repetition, not only between some of the bites and the sequence but really annoying repetition of the bites themselves if you rolled-on, rolled off and then decided to play the entire sequence to have to hear the bite again first.
• Roll-over, button goes from almost transparent to opaque. This was just a greedy visual thing but I think it would have visually isolated each of the individual stories and would have contributed a more empty, transient space where the stories exist.
• That the blue chapter title at the bottom of the sound window was a link with its own visual properties. I tried tinkering with the HTML but to little success, everything I tried either affected the link scheme of the whole page or the code I wrote showed up in the visual window.

Other than that I was fairly pleased with the result. I liked the atmosphere created by the photo and the representation of the people telling their parts of the narrative. I liked that I was able to give as much control as I could to the user in the navigation and in starting and stopping the sounds. Most of all I’m pleased with the adjoining blog and the way this sets up not only a feeling of a real living culture but also a space where the narrative can evolve and grow in a virtual space which spans the diaspora. I really hope part of it takes off in a similar way to the Sonic Memorial Project.

Many thanks to Dean for putting up with my hair-brained ideas and helping find solutions, and to Julian and JHC for trusting me with this part of their overall project.

Question of Distribution

Distribution, in my mind, has been key to the objectives of ethical practice. Enghel refers to the distribution process quite heavily in her analysis and looks that the limitations different approaches bring in terms of editorial control. There are a number of things to consider under modes of distribution agreements; for me I feel it important to be able to guarantee participants some broadcast outcome when I ask/invite them onboard the project. I obviously fail to meet the communities’ needs if no-one ends up hearing it. But distribution agreements have other effects such as significantly impacting the funding available. A commission kills two birds; it would bring both production funding and guarantee broadcast. On the flip side the broadcaster or funding body writes the conditions on the level of editorial control.

In Enghel’s Argentinian example she found that although they had collaborated with the community on editorial decisions, she realised that the funding/distribution body still had the power (even though it was not an used in this case) to pass down their own editorial demands which would have been absolute.

In my naivety, I imagined I’d have some responsibility to send drafts to the ABC and to be in fairly constant communication and to act on their requests. I’d anticipated an “interesting” experience in finding balances of what participants were comfortable with and what the ABC was comfortable with. However, after quite a lengthy conversation yesterday its clear that the editorial power necessary under the ABC commission protocols leaves no room for consultation in the editoral phase. The way it works it for producers to go to the program offices (Sydney) to work through the recorded raw material into an initial structure, through editing, through to final sound-engineering. So clearly there is a significant conflict between the requirements of ABC and the approach which makes up the body of research and argument for this project. So I’m feeling that this is a minor set-back.

But all is not lost, the ABC producer I spoke to was really supportive of the story idea and encouraged me to consider producing it independently. Independent Production is not only financially more risky with no guarantee of selling the feature in the end, but it also means I have less guarantee of a national broadcast when approaching participants, although it would be possible to approach other community broadcasters. But I suppose its a balance of what is more important for the participants; is it consultation and opportunities for editorial input or is it a guarantee of broadcast outcomes. In keeping with consultative practices, I’ll probably need to discuss this with the communities involved.