Miksi Demokratia? Saksassa. Don Edkins 09.10.08

Miksi Demokratia sarjan elokuvia levitetään Afrikassa kouluihin mm. YK:n tuella. Don Edkins kirjoittaa kokemuksista Saksassa. Dokumenttiprojektissa
ti 14.10 klo 22.05 Durakovo. 
 
Some ime ago I was in Frankfurt to take part in a discussion about the Why Democracy? documentary film project. It was organised under the auspices. of the ‘Fernsehworkshop Entwicklungspolitik’ 
 
This is, I think, a particularly German event. Roughly translated it means ‘Workshop about Television and Development”. I don’t know if similar meetings take place in other country, but in Germany, this is a serious topic.
 
Those on the panel included Hans Robert Eisenhauer from ZDF/Arte – who was part of the Why Democracy? working group, and through whom, four of the films were commissioned by the Arte system (‘Taxi to the Dark Side’, ‘Bloody Cartoons’, ‘Dinner with the President’, ‘In search of Gandhi’).
 
There was Ulrich Spies from the Adolf-Grimme Institute that awards the best German television programmes. Detlef Gericke Schönhagen who runs the Film, Television and Radio department at the Goethe Institute’s headquarters in Munich, and Thorsten Schilling from the Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung - BpB).
 
They were all connected in one way or another with the project – the BpB had supported the project financially in return for getting the educational rights to the films for Germany. This collection includes the 13 short films by young filmmakers and the 10 Questions of 10 x 6 minutes edited by Kim Finn – see www.whydemocracy.net. They have also produced an excellent set of educational support material to all the films in German, see www.bpb.de or http://www.bpb.de/publikationen/7NX5VU,0,Demokratie_f%FCr_alle.html
 
The Goethe Institute had provided funding towards the short films and in return have educational rights to the films for all their 70 institutes around the world, through which they organize 25,000 film screenings each year.
 
And the project had been nominated this year for an Adolf Grimme award.
 
Discussion revolved around making films on political and social issues for television, on audiences, and how to use the films as part of educational initiatives – could the project be a model for combining television and education? Other questions raised were about the potential for making quality films for television, and how much ‘foreign’ programming or North-South dialogue German television would allow.
 
While the answers did indicate less and less, there is real support for such projects and documentary films.
 
Some of the remarks around Why Democracy? as a project were very useful, and need to be taken into account for future projects, i.e. that similar partners should be involved much earlier on during the project.