The floating cinema: environmental education documentaries
The Floating Cinema was a participatory media for environmental education research project run as part of an environmental awareness program for the floating communities of Tonle Sap. The Tonle Sap is the largest freshwater lake in South East Asia and the biggest inland fishery in the world. There a...
| Summary: | The Floating Cinema was a participatory media for environmental education research project run as part of an environmental awareness program for the floating communities of Tonle Sap. The Tonle Sap is the largest freshwater lake in South East Asia and the biggest inland fishery in the world. There are over 1 million people living in floating settlements on the lake whose livelihoods are totally dependent on the productivity of the lake and over 3 million additional people mostly dependent on the lake (Ratner et. al., 2017). This productivity is increasingly reliant on complex integrated water management with diverse stakeholders across the Mekong basin (Keskinen, 2006). The Floating Cinema was part of an environmental education and awareness program run by the Cambodian-French non-government organisation Osmose. Supported by the Spanish NGO Asociacion Solidaria Andaluza De Desarrollo (ASAD), Osmose implemented a reform of their environmental education and awareness program from mid-2010. The previous model of environmental education developed by Osmose in 2002 was adapted to respond to pressing contemporary issues such as overfishing, hydroelectric construction on the Mekong and climate change. In addition, curriculum was developed for a wider age range, including an adult education program. There was also a focus on creating broader impact beyond direct participants in the program with a hope to transmit key messages from the program across the villages as a whole and potentially to other floating settlements. Participatory videos are an accessible tool to approach certain issues with the community in order to enable them become creatively engaged in producing stories that reflect on issues and solutions to local problems. In the videos produced for this research project, the environment plays the leading role, while children and adults who have participated in the education and awareness program are the creative team. Along with teachers, participants developed a message and a creative treatment of this message. The result was a series of participatory videos in which community people talk about some of the most pressing environmental issues in their village. The program began with a 2-week training in two villages in April 2011, continued over the course of the semester with classes developing their own scripts and a final 2 week facilitated production process in June. Videos were edited in Phnom Penh and sent to communities for feedback and approval, prior to completion and screenings from August. This model was inspired by the Fogo Process, run by filmmakers working with National Film Board of Canada and Memorial University in Newfoundland in 1966 on Fogo Island (as detailed in Potter (2012, 2014). As with Fogo, the floating villages face a range of complex environmental and social issues. There was little connectivity between the villages due to distance, no mains electricity and no local communications such as telephones or radio. However, many issues were shared and needed to be addressed collectively. Developing locally relevant information that could bridge these gaps and build a sense of collective identity was also important. The participatory video process supported villagers to describe local issues in their own way, to communicate that local concern between villages and ultimately to share that concern through the videos with a wider population. |
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