TEDxVolcano 2

Cara Mertes, the director of the Sundance Institute's documentary film program, called it the first "flash forum" she'd ever attended. Truth is, last night's TEDxVolcano gathering was the first such instant event that any of us had ever attended -- a little over two hours of short talks, film clips and music that had been pulled together (crowdsourced) spontaneously by blogger Nathaniel Whittemore and several other cause-wired souls for the hundreds of Skoll World Forum attendees stranded in London.

Some of the 12 speakers presenting at the TED-style event -- held at The Hub (a co-location work space in King's Cross in central London) -- spoke eloquently about the nature and importance of serendipity. Entrepreneur Gary Bolles called this "a moment in time that can be essential for all of us to reconsider how to upgrade the impact we have on the world or how we can spread the influence of what we do in our lifetimes. Perhaps it is an opportunity for all of us to do more."

But not all speakers urged a gentle embrace of the circumstances that had brought them (yours truly, included) together again. Larry Brilliant, the American physician and director of the Skoll Global Threats Fund, said there is a strong relationship between the volcanic eruption in Iceland and climate change -- "not the kind you think" but a relationship caused, instead, by the fact that "we don't know (much) about a lot of very important things" including science.

"...Right now, the single most important thing the world faces is climate change," he said. "It is the exacerbater of issues of war, water, population growth, pandemics and policy." Despite this, he said, "science is under attack from a new generation of Luddites, of climate deniers ... while the science about volcanos is uncertain, one this is certain: we need more -- not less - science. We need more and better scientists and we need to fund science better to create an entirely new cadre of scientists and new staff to help us address and tackle the problems of the 21st century." Thanks to the rapid evolution of information technology, he added, humans -- for the first time -- can see environmental problems earlier, though "we still don't always know if what we're finding is going to be a smaller or a bigger problem" down the road.

Brilliant suggested that "maybe there's a reason we all are here together tonight. We are going to witness, over the next few days, the interplay between science and policy as every King and President calls the Prime Minister (UK) complaining that their son or daughter is stuck in London; we're going to see an interplay of all of those things antecedent to the great global threats that we face. We are going to learn, if we haven't started to already, that we are all in this together. There is no rich, no poor in this. We're all grounded, equally."

Brilliant concluded his remarks with the admonition that "everything we will learn from science is going to help us. Science is the set of headlights by which we steer this ship. We need to fight for science because we are going to need every tool we can muster to deal with the problems we are going to face in the future."

Among other highlights of TEDxVolcano:

* Matthew Bishop of The Economist said Goldman Sachs' problems and the failings of Wall Street serve as reminders of the complexity of today's world. "The world has changed; a whole paradigm proved to be faulty and the practitioners of it couldn't see that the world had changed," he said. "The lesson here, the challenge to this moment, is to think: 'What changes are there that we are missing because we are just carrying on as normal?'" Bishop also asked what could be done to improve the quality of public debate over the tough and complex issues facing the world. "There is a moment now in our history that says if we rise up and think big enough, we can come up with a much more intelligent public discussion," he said. "We are really going to need it, and if we don't have it, we're all in big trouble."

* Travel news correspondent Peter Greenberg, on his way to Heathrow to do a stand-up report for CBS on the continued cancellations of flights, predicted the volcano would have greater impact on the economy than did 9/11. "People cannot fly but cargo cannot fly, either," he said. "Today, in Kenya, 400 tons of flowers are rotting and have to be thrown away. For every day we are not flying and air cargo is not flying, documents are still not being delivered, medicines are not being delivered, human organs for transplant are not being delivered ... the economic impact is going to be huge."

* Cara Mertes of Sundance spoke about the leveling effect of nature. "I thought I was clever enough to figure out a way home but none of us were clever enough because we're all here," she said. "Money doesn't matter, either. You can have a private jet but that just means you might die alone. So now I realize I'm in an alternate reality. To understand it is to see patterns in things, so I started thinking about what the pattern was here -- and here's what I think: the Earth is talking back. And I think the Earth is saying, 'You people are not listening.' What it is actually saying is that we have a really big problem on our hands with the current levels of human disruption. We are getting a sneak preview of what would happen with climate collapse. It's a peaceful sneak preview. Nobody died to tell us what we have to go through, right? But what will happen when serious cataclysmic events start happening across the planet?" Then, recalling a speech by environmentalist Paul Hawken earlier this week at the Skoll Forum, Mertes said: "We don't live in an historical moment but in a civilization moment. This is a generation that has to decide if we're even going to have a civilization."

* Jeff Skoll, founder and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, and Sally Osberg, the director of it, both read poems they wrote on the trip down from Oxford. Osberg's riffed on Robert Frost's Fire and Ice; Skoll's had a lighter feel to it, ending with the declaration: "Damn the volcano; let's have a ball."

* A performance by singer Susheela Raman

* A showing of the short video, Pixels, by Patrick Jean:

Watch this site for further coverage, as long as I'm still in London.

-- Marcia Stepanek

Interventions

Upheavals in the news business have created a shortage of people telling deep and complex stories about critical issues in society, says Cara Mertes, director of the Sundance documentary film program, and that gap is giving rise to a new trend, what Mertes calls “self-designated storytelling”—amateur filmmakers stepping in to fill the void. We caught up with Mertes last week at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford to talk about the changes. “Storytelling is, increasingly, a form of intervention,” she told Cause Global. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation:

What is the climate for documentary film in today’s world?
Right now, in this moment, one of the most exciting things is that documentary film has become a kind of international language. I talk about it as being the lingua franca of the issues: it is much less expensive than feature film. You can make a documentary virtually alone, and there are a lot of these kinds of self-designated storytellers in documentary now.

Eric Daniel Metzgar, who made Reporter [which debuted at Sundance in January], was one man going. He didn’t even bring a camera person or a sound person. He went with his camera and accompanied Nick Kristof and made the story out of that. So it’s very much an under-the-radar approach to becoming a filmmaker. As I travel around the world, I come across this again and gain—people saying, This is the way I want to tell my story in the world. We see in the West, particularly, an erosion of independent journalism; journalism isn’t filling that gap anymore and so we have documentary filmmakers stepping up and saying, like Eric did, I want to know about the Congo and so I guess I’ll go there and make a film about it.

So it's a combination of globalization and journalism-in-turmoil?
Particularly in the United States, “international” has never been a priority; as we become more linked globally, suddenly that linkage is very apparent to people. Every morning, you can wake up now and hear about the stock markets around the world. A year ago, we were not hearing about that as much; now we do hear it—we see it now like the weather. It's embedded in people’s consciousness now that we are interdependent and that is creating a demand for stories that can help us understand what that interdependency means. What are the conflicts? What are the things that are creating an interruption to what we might call a more just society? This transcends politics. Ever since 9/11, we have begun to understand that something could happen to us and we all want to be a little bit more prepared. Documentary is a kind of wake-up call for people; people have a hunger now for knowledge that can help them make better decisions as they move through life.

How are social media influencing documentary filmmaking?
There are many different kinds of storytelling strategies we’re seeing deployed now. We’re seeing more and more Flip cameras, and certainly, cell phones are starting to be used to capture content. I don’t think we’re seeing short docs on cell phones—yet. You can’t really edit on a cell phone yet, but you will be able to. We’re going to see yet another transformation [in the evolution of documentary film], I think, and the types of people deciding they want to use visual storytelling will continue to expand. It is an incredibly exciting moment because we’re now seeing a huge range of new participation—you know, the 10-year-old is making documentaries now along with the 45-year-old Oscar-winning documentary maker. The two may seem very far apart but the linkage is that people are using nonfiction storytelling as a way to express themselves. And one might be considered amateur and one is considered a professional—and it’s apples and oranges —but in terms of the desire to explain the world, it’s exactly the same.

What new conversations are surfacing because of this explosion in grassroots filmmaking?
I think we’re seeing filmmakers going international in ways we’ve not seen before. Western filmmakers are going internationally to tell stories, and international filmmakers are telling more stories not of their regions. They’re also moving out of their countries to tell stories now. There’s a big change happening in terms of what kinds of stories are being told. It’s all just much more international than it used to be. We’re also seeing filmmakers experiment a lot more. They’re using animation; they’re using reenactments; they’re using incredible soundscapes. Consider Iraq in Fragments by James Longley. He shot this film by himself and he told me that it’s 39 tracks mixed down; so he created a whole score basically on his own, on his own computer. So when you see something like that, it's really moving into a different space in terms of storytelling that is inspired and anchored in documentary—but moves way beyond it.

Why is an empathetic audience better than a sympathetic one?
When we work with filmmakers in our labs at Sundance, we dive deep into the story that they are telling. And that sympathy/ empathy question is one of the most sophisticated, complicated questions you can ask about any given story, because ultimately, you’re asking how you want your audience to feel. What do you want them to receive from the story? Filmmakers often think they are making a story that will make their audiences do something when they’re really helping them to feel sympathy. Sympathy is something that people can feel and then move on. Empathy moves audiences to a new place, to action. So at the beginning of Reporter, that’s the very question Eric David Metzgar is asking when he shows you a close-up of an African boy and says, “We’ve been asked to care before.” What Metzgar is doing is pointing out to us, the audience, right away, that we need to do more. He’s telling people that they are going to sit for 90 minutes and they are going to do more than just feel sympathy for this young man.

It’s the question of impact.
The most difficult place to get impact is in the West because it’s a place where you have to break through the [media] noise. Ninety percent of our media is filled with ads and commercial media and commercial films, so how do you break through that clutter and get an audience’s attention for documentary? It’s not a storytelling question. It’s a money question. In documentary film, nobody has an ad budget but must because otherwise, nobody’s going to notice that your film is there.

Censorship is also a challenge—especially now, as more documentary work goes international.
We fund internationally and we do have to be very careful about how we support our artists. So for instance, we funded a couple of filmmakers in Turkey. They made a film that didn’t really have much of a human rights framework at all but it was about the Kurds in the East and the Turkish government’s ban on teachers teaching kids the Kurdish language. Children there have to learn to speak Turkish first and they’re not supposed to speak Kurdish publicly. These filmmakers did a story about a teacher. In order to get accredited as a teacher, you have to teach in the Eastern part of the country for a year, in the wilderness, serve your time before you can come back and teach in Ankara or Istanbul—the cities you really want to live in.

There were a number of people on our committee who were western human rights experts and they were kind of appalled that these Turkish filmmakers didn’t mention at all the bloodshed, the oppression the Kurds had suffered because of this government policy and so forth. I had to sit there and say, Well, this is true; there have been huge human rights campaigns around the Turks and Kurds, and this is one of the deadliest realities we see with a nationality that’s within another nation-state—and the Kurds are the largest population of people without a country. They have a region but they don’t’ have a country. And there was really no mention of this at all in this film. And I had to think that if they wanted to stay in Turkey—if they don’t want to become diasporic artists—we at Sundance have to support those filmmakers who are developing a kind of metaphorical language—think Russian in the 1930s, right? I’m talking about a kind of metaphorical language through documentary that some filmmakers need to be able to talk about the things that concern them.

So I said listen, if we put just a little card at the front that is a very basic outline to let people know there’s an issue here, then great. We want them to be able to show it in Turkey. We don’t want them to have to move [out of Turkey]. Just because you’re funded by Sundance shouldn’t mean you have to leave your country. Yet this is more common than you might think. We have funded a number of artists who can’t stay in-country any longer because of the documentary film work they are doing. When people become successful filmmakers, the government notices, so we do have a lot of filmmakers who have moved from Middle Eastern countries; there are Chinese filmmakers who live in Canada now because they can no longer work in China. That’s a really important development in the documentary world.

Where is the most creative work being done by young filmmakers?
In places in transition—countries in transition that are becoming more democratic, more open, and more free-market—China, for instance. As China becomes more open and more westernized in certain ways, documentary film and filmmaking, generally, will become an increasingly popular avenue that young people will seek out to make a difference. Storytelling in this way is intervention.

( Illustration by istock.com)