On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing

As the work subsides to a grinding halt and am working from home now concentrating on various projects and plans. Last friday at the BSC show I bumped into the focus puller from Little Terrorist (I did the making on in early 2004 out in India). He is setting up a website that is a content based platform for developing communities to air their video work, giving them a voice in the media.

I have been briefly involved with Participatory Video with my friend Warren who is travelling the world working with various NGO's. Recently working in Romania where I met up with him (and most recently in London). He taught and facilitated video work with teenagers with HIV and with a marginalized group from a rural place (please see previous blog entries).

I had talk to them both about each others work and it seems a direct and very feasble strand to make
A) the work and
B) the platform to show it

Meeting them both recently again reminds me that there is a world that doesn't care about films or music videos. People who are concerned about basic education and healthcare for their families. It reminds me of the notion not far from my constant thoughts that this is the work I want to do. For now I will do what I can and continue with the fiction. I am debasing fiction not at all. In the words of Arundhati Roy:

"Writers cull stories from the world, stories reveal themselves to us, the public narrative, the private narrative, they colonize us... they comission us... they insist on being told. Fiction and non fiction are only different techniques of story telling, for reasons I don't fully understand, fiction dances out of me and non fiction is wrenched out b the aching, broken world that I wake up to every morning. The theme of much of what I write, fiction as well as non fiction is the relationship between power and powerlessnes and the endless circular conflict they're engaged in. John Berger that most wonderful writer once wrote, 'Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one, there can never be a single story, there are only ways of seeing'."

Further in this speech, 'Come September', she eloquently expresses our global age about 'the war on terror' revolving around the true and encompassing belief of 'power'. Providing historical context and humour, she speaks out an awesome and noble non fiction opera.


It is a reminder that we should in responsibility to the human race and for ourselves, the world we and our children live in should not be run in the manner in which our covert governments pass policy. We pay our taxes and in turn, they use our money to kill civillians in other countries (currently your money is being used to kill men, women and children in Afghanistan and Iraq), countries Britain or the United States have no reason to be in, to invade. Colonization is dressed up as spreading 'democracy' and the 'war on terror' (a title which was stolen from an 1980's campaign from the Reagan Administration).

I was naive when younger to think that the world was good and that the world was as it is and we need to accept it. But it isn't. And we do have to accept that, but we shouldn't accept the way it is. The world is not as it is and we should leave how it is, the world, is what we make it.

It is difficult to really understand what kind of world other people live in if one hasn't been. I did, for a very brief period in Palestine last year. I met people who lived in Gaza who have F16's fly by in the middle of the night every week scaring the shit out of families. I met a child who was shot twice in both legs. I was stuck at a checkpoint for an hour with a baby who needed heart surgery. These times are very real, we just don't inhabit the same world. Like children we are just as good at being 'out of sight, out of mind'.

We perhaps cannot do much but we have to do something no matter how seemingly small and insignificant to do our part to make a better planet to live on. Or we make wake one day to realize all our freedoms were simply illusions from our heavy reliance on the media and our modern society of manufactured consent.

I would like to end with a further extract from the same speech Arundhati Roy gave for the Lannan Foundation Lectures:

"In follow up to the 1917 Balfour declaration which imperial Britain issued with it's army massed outside the gates of Gaza. The Balfour declaration promised Europeon Zionist a national home for Jewish people. At the time the Empire on which the sun never set was free to snatch and bequeath national homes like a school bully distributes marbles. How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial britain's festering, blood drenched gifts to the modern world. Both are fault lines in the raging international conflicts of today. In 1937 Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians, I quote, 'I do not agree that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lay there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance that the great wrong has been done to the red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more wordly wise race to put it that way has come in and taken their place'. That set the trend for the Isreali's state's attitude towards Palestinians."

For the whole speech and the best 45mins you will spend today:



- J

ps. Churchill said and did some aspiring and great things in his time, though this, was not one of them.