Bring Media that Matters to Your Campus

Whether documenting what is right in their backyards or half a world away, young filmmakers are taking media into their own hands. Find out how you can get involved.

Young filmmakers, screenwriters and animators are taking on everything from culture-jamming to AIDS to factory farming to rural poverty to childhood obesity in the Media That Matters film festival – and it might be coming to a campus near you.

Media that Matters is a project of MediaRights, a non-profit organization that connects filmmakers, activists, educators and youth. The film festival celebrates 16 high-impact short films, boiled down from hundreds of submissions, created by seasoned pros and teenage first-timers and everyone in between.

The series, sponsored by the Sundance channel and shown at several film festivals, will crisscross the country this April as part of their DIY screening month. Click here to pick up a copy of the DVD to show at your own school and find out about submitting your own work for next year’s festival.

Media Rights and the film festival itself focus on media with a message. The films aren’t dryly educational; they come with thumping soundtracks, high-tech animations and compelling storylines as well as a profound sense of progressive social purpose.

You can check out all the action on their website which, in addition to running all of the winning short issue-oriented films, contains links to action items including ways to volunteer, petitions to sign, and educational resources – so there is no excuse for just being a couch potato.

(If you are a young filmmaker yourself, or just want to check out the work of your peers, visit Media Rights Youth Media Distribution database where you can post your own films or find ones ranging from hip-hop politics in Minnesota – be sure to watch for Walter Mondale learning how to scratch – to the video diary of two Southeast Asian immigrant teens in love, one a straight-A student and the other a former gang member. For first-timers, the site has a toolkit that includes budgeting guides, legal and copyright information, and festival notifications.)

We chose a few of our favorite shorts from the festival DVD and talked with their young creators about their subjects, their creative process, and their advice for students interested in making their own media.

iThemba
(click to watch – Quicktime required)

iThemba is an intimate portrait of the Sinikithemba Choir, a singing group made up of 30 HIV+ South Africans, who perform around the world to promote global awareness of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the region while pushing for the medicines they all need to stave off death. The film was created by two 25-year-olds, Keefe Murren and Nelson Walker, who met in college, where Keefe majored in Anthropology and Film Studies and Nelson majored in American Studies and did a senior thesis on blaxploitation cinema.

They first discovered their subject and got initial funding through Harvard Medical School’s HIV/AIDS research program. They knew they had found their story when the met Zinhle, a 26-year-old choir member who is at the heart of the story. Says Keefe, “She’s not part of any committees, or activist organizations, but her life story is of paramount political importance. Her courage to live as an openly positive person in a community still grappling with the crippling effects of stigma is in itself a bold political act.” After finding such a compelling and eloquent subject they reshaped their film to focus on her story as a way of telling the much larger story of HIV in South Africa. Keefe feels that their youth was an asset on this film as they were able to empathize with Zinhle: “The three of us formed an immediate connection …we talked about dating and dancing and music and family. [It] allowed us to make a much more intimate and honest film than we had at first thought possible.”

The short available through the Media that Matters film festival is based on a 60 minute longer version of the film, which cost $50,000 to produce, was shot on digital video and then edited in Keefe’s bedroom. For other aspiring young filmmakers, Keefe’s advice is not for the faint of heart. “Remove all the obstacles from your life that prevent you from making films. Quit that 9-5 job that keeps you from finding stories. Learn to shoot. Learn to edit. Open yourself up to risk and have the courage to make mistakes. Adapt and learn. The ideal situation for making a film will never arise; figure out a way to do it anyway.”

Struggling to Survive
(click to watch – Quicktime required)

During the summer and fall of 2003, Mary Profitt, Dana Hall and Ashley Potter, all 19 or 20 and with no media training to speak of, conceptualized, shot and edited the award-winning Struggling to Survive. The film documents the living wage crisis in their own community – the relatively small, sleepy and economically depressed Whitesburg, Kentucky.

“We had all experienced the $5.15 hour minimum wage thing personally so it seemed like a good idea for a film,” Ashley explains. “Our community is a really really small, poverty stricken area. I just saw how it affected my family, going to elementary school. Everybody knows everybody because the town is so small, you knew everybody’s business. You have the coal miners, a lot of fast food jobs in the area but not so many family diners, mostly all big chains. They are all little jobs; there is nothing here to expand upon.” Ashley is now a sophomore at Morehead University where she is majoring in music education, somewhat of an anomaly in the town where, she says, most kids don’t go to college choosing, instead, to follow in their dad’s steps working in local coal mines and the like.

The film, which was produced through a program at Appalshop a community media program for youth in the Appalachian region of Eastern Kentucky, was inspired by a living wage ordinance in the area that had failed twice under pressure from the business community. Recommended to Appalshop by an art teacher, Ashley started slowly, first learning how to use a still digital camera, then a video camera, then microphones and finally editing techniques. Though she intends to become a music teacher upon graduation, she wouldn’t mind trying her hand at filmmaking again, “media misses things,” Ashley explained, “I wanted to show the pure facts and stories.”

The Meatrix
(click to watch – Quicktime required)

To get at the underbelly of the factory farming industry, Louis Fox, 30, created The Meatrix, a clever send up of The Matrix films that stars an animated young pig named Leo instead of the robotic Keanu Reeves. Leo thinks he lives on a lovely family farm, that is, until he is approached by Moopheus, a hardened, trench coat clad cow who shows him the dark truths about agribusiness. In the three months after the short flash movie’s release in November 2003, a staggering 4.2 million people around the world watched and it garnered press coverage from around the globe. That makes it the most-watched advocacy ad in Internet history.

Louis is one of the co-founders of Free Range Graphics a graphic design firm focused on promoting do-gooders. He went to film school at SUNY Purchase where he wasn’t much of an activist, he says, but grew into it through his work though, with his skill set, he could have made bank promoting cheese burgers and sneakers. Reflecting on the success of the Meatrix, which took him three months to make, he says “I like doing this kind of pop culture parody, I want to see more people using pop culture to the advantage of progressive causes.”

Louis isn’t a Matrix obsessed geek but he saw the opportunity to use The Matrix to get at a message. “We didn’t start out wanting to make fun of The Matrix but we were just trying to boil the issue down to the main points we needed to get across. And we asked ourselves ‘how do we get people to hear us?’ And this was the answer.”