Blog posting written by Patricia Zimmermann, professor, cinema, photography and media art at Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival

What Makes Me Mad

We need more top ten lists of the best documentaries of the year. 

Enough of this entertainment industry pablum about the rise of the theatrical documentary.  Most of the documentaries celebrated in these reviews are American, use narrative arcs and characters, and draft genre conventions to minimize complexity, abstraction, and explanation. 

Here’s my challenge: we should multiply and amplify as many lists as possible of the best documentaries of the year. And not just the wanna-be-theatricals-coopting-community-as-outreach-until-the-feature-is-greenlighted films.

This is that endlessly fun time of year when e-blasts from Variety, the New York Times, The Village Voice and Indiewire announcing endless top ten lists percolate like mustard seeds popping in hot oil in a wok in my inbox. 

Okay, I’ll admit it: I love the lists.  

They rank up there with the Academy Awards as beloved film rituals that mean everyone I know will want to chat about film rather than the Republican coup d’etat in Washington.   How glorious:  at my local haunts, Island Fitness and  Gimme Coffee, the talk shifts from Obama and nautilus and  sustainable coffee to…cinema.  Heaven!

These lists jab me with guilt about films I saw earlier in the year that drifted away from memory. And then they flood me with regrets about other films that I never got around to seeing or that only had a short run at Cinemapolis in Ithaca. Netflix can’t remedy the exhilaration of a packed house and popcorn.

But something really, really bugs me about these lists. They overflow with commercial American industry narrative films with big budgets for marketing even though the films pirate the ambiguities of episodic plots and exploration of philosophical ideas from international art cinema. So please, DO NOT TALK TO ME ANYMORE about BLACK SWAN!

Professional film reviewers joust to outdo each other to write the most pithy one-line descriptions advertising their penetrating wit and puns. They always seem to toss in a film that only rarefied people who go to film festivals in Rio, Seoul, Mumbia or Berlin can see. 

What I Did About It

So, I am fighting back.

I'm reverse engineering these lists. I ‘m crowdsourcing top ten lists, call it participatory listmaking, or the end of the US centric cinematic empire of the top ten list. 

I popped out a status update on Facebook asking my friends for their picks for groundbreaking and game-changing documentary of 2010. Then I culled the lists and put them in alphabetical order.

If you want to know what the films are about, just click on the link. If you want to add a film, just slide it into the comments section of this blog, or find me on Facebook. 

Oh, I forgot to mention something. On my lists, the films don’t have to be theatrical. They just need to be game-changers. 

The Results

Bhutto (Duane Baughman and and Johnny O’Hara, USA, 2010), submitted by Elisabeth Hoffman, Northwestern University in Qatar

Catfish (Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, USA, 2010), submitted by Terry Huynh, Los Angeles

Exit through the Gift Shop (Banksy, USA/UK, 2010), submitted by Jason Longo, self-employed Director of Photography

His and Hers (Ken Wardup, Ireland, 2009) , submitted by Matt Fee, Ithaca College

I’m Still Here (Casey Affleck, USA, 2010), submitted by Emily Gallagher, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, New York

Last Train Home (Lixin Fan, Canada/China/UK, 2010), submitted by Elisabeth Press, Open Plans, New York

Sweetgrass (Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, USA, 2009)  submitted by Patricia Zimmermann, Ithaca College

Tears of Gaza (Vibeke Lokkeberg,Norway/Occupied Palestinian Territory, 2010) , submitted by Bjorn Sorenssen, Norwegian  University of Science and Technology

The Regretters (Marcus Linden, Sweden, 2010), submitted by Patrick Sjoberg, Karlstad University, Sweden

Waiting for Superman (Davis Guggenheim, USA, 2010) , submitted by Dave Prunty, Ithaca College

There’s a lot more to Mexico than cheap location shooting for Hollywood films and narcotrafficantes.

At the 7th Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia from October 3-11, the Mexican documentary, feature, and shorts scene pulses with topics like labor, agribusiness, and toxins in the muckraking documentary Pueblos Unidos (Felipe Casanoa, Miguel Angel Diaz, Mexico, 2008) charting the relationship between swine flu and the Carroll Company pig farm in Veracruz, and visual and editing innovations in epic hybrid experimental/documentary films like Natalia Almada’s exquisite El General (Mexico/USA 2009), a film questioning Mexican political history and the articulation of power.

Exceptionally programmed and impeccably organized, the Festival Internacional de Cinema de Morelia is one of three major film festivals in Mexico--and the only one to showcase Mexican cinema in all its forms and production levels. It’s a heady, intoxicating, eye-opening concoction that changes how you see and think about Mexico. One notable programming sidebar was a screening of  Hollywood film director John Huston's films shot in Mexico called Imaginary Mexico, featuring Night of the Iguana (1964), Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), and Under the Volcano (1983). The mostly Mexican audience chuckled at the stereotyped muraca-wielding cabana boys in Night of the Iguana, but gave the film a rousing reception anyway.

The Mexico City International Contemporary Film Festival screens international fare, while the Guadalajara International Film Festival serves as a market for Latin American Cinema. Unlike these other two festivals, the Festival Internacional de Cinema de Morelia, although it rolls as many as 12 films at a time, is easy to navigate, since most of the screening venues are within four blocks of each other.

A historic, well preserved colonial city founded in the 1500s, Morelia, the capital city of Michoachan, was declared a Unesco World Heritage site in 1991. The city center, where most of the festival screenings, parties and panels take place, features a large plaza constantly throbbing with music, clowns and people, a jaw-droppingly beautiful 17th century cathedral, and well-preserved colonial architecture and porticos flanking picturesque cobblestone streets. Outdoor cafes abound, where you can sip chocolate moreliano, a regional speciality.

Through collaborations with the Critics’ Week of the Cannes Film Festival, the Oberhausen Festival, the Romanian embassy, and curators like Daniela Michel (the General Director of the festival), Jesse Lerner, Shannon Kelly, Elena Fortes, the Morelia Festival functions as a fulcrum where international art cinema, experimental shorts, Mexican films, indigeneous community productions, and long form documentaries coexist in dynamic intersections.

This year, director Cristian Mungiu curated 26 Romanian narrative, documentary and short films. Highlights included the silent film The Independence of Romania (1912) with live piano accompaniment, Boogie (Radu Muntean, 2008) a look at gender and postcommunist capitalism starring Anamaria Marinca (from Four Weeks, Three Months, Two Days), and the stunning Children of the Decree (Florin Iepan, 2004), a startling documentary expose of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Decree 770 that forbade abortion and all forms of contraception.

You can see Michael Haneke’s White Ribbon and then watch a program of Mexican short films in the same theater. Extraordinary detailed, nuanced narrative films exploring diasporan North African muslim populations in Europe like London River (Rachid Bouchareb, UK/France, 2009) and Adieu Gary (Nassim Amaouche (France, 2009) were mixed in with more commercial festival fare like Coco before Chanel (Anne Fontaine, France, 2009)and The Informant (Steven Soderbergh, USA, 2009). One of the most compelling, evocative discoveries of the festival was Whisper with the Wind (Shahram Alidi, Iran/Iraq,/Kurdistan, 2009), a surreal narrative with compelling cinematography telling the tales of a postman who makes and delivers recordings of people’s messages amidst the devastation of depopulation, genocide and destruction in the mountains of Kurdistan.

US based programmer Jesse Lerner curated the Cine sin Fronteras section, a challenging, well conceived mix of Mexican and American short experimental and documentary films exploring immigration and its devastating human costs. Two of the most dramatic, well researched films on this topic were In the Shadow of the Raid (Greg Bosnan, Jennifer Szymaszek, UK, 2009) and Migrar o Morir (Alexandra Halkin, Mexico, 2008). Omar Delgado, Elena Pardo, and Regina Melo represent new voices in Mexican experimental work.

The Morelia Festival provides a critical space for art cinema in an exhibition environment colonized by Hollywood transnationals. As a result, it also functions as an incubator for an astoundingly heterogeneous array of Mexican films: a retrospective of Purepecha filmmaker Dante Cerano, films from Michoacan, Mexican narrative films (particularly notable was Alamar by Pedro Gonzales-Rubio, , Mexican shorts (with provocative works by David Romay, Benjamin Lezama Gonzalez, and Ileana Leyva, Isaac Ezban), and documentaries.

Presumed Guilty (Roberto Hernandez and Georffrey Smith, Mexico, 2009), about the problems of evidence and injustices in the legal system in Mexico, grabbed a ten minute standing ovation and nabbed the top prize for documentary. Clearly, a new wave of Mexican documentary has blossomed beyond the tales of immigration, in such collaborative poetic films like Flores en el Desierto, made with the Huicholes people, hybrid experimental, performative documentary essays about violence in border towns like Tijuaneados Anominos: Una Lagrima, Una Sonrisa (Ana Paola Ridriquez, Jose Luis Figueroa, Mexico 2009), and La Cuerda Floja, a Spanish produced acutely photographed observational film about a traditional circus family.

By jacking Mexican cinemas into conversation with other international cinemas, The Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia is one of the most thoughtfully programmed, politically provocative, high profile festivals in the world. It reverses one’s vectors in every way, where you leave seeing the world through Mexico's eyes.

I dare you: Imagine a world where innovative  documentaries tour around a country in major cineplexes with state of the art digital projection and THX sound. 

No, not the next Michael Moore sardonic-missionary-I’m-gonna-teach-you-about-America’s-problems doc.  No, not the next-big-budget –genre-pix-hipster-white-dudes-with-a-purpose theatrical docs like Food Inc, The Cove, Chicago 10.

Imagine yourself going to a multiplex theater with a rooftop bar and seeing films like Natalia Almada’s El General, a feature length, epic, experimental essay ruminating on one hundred years of power in Mexico, or Alexandra Halkin’s Migrar y Morir, an expose of transnational agribusiness exploitation of workers and the environment in Sinaloa.

Now, remember this name and repeat after me:  Ambulante. 

Ambulate is a traveling documentary film festival in Mexico that brings new long form documentaries pushing the edges of the genre to 12 cities around Mexico, spanning Monterrey, Tijuana and Leon in the north, Morelia, Mexico City and Puebla in central Mexico, and San Cristobal and Oaxaca in the south.  The screenings fill the house.

“There are no opportunities to distribute documentaries in Mexico,” explained Elena Fortes, the feisty, focused, and ferociously sharp director of Ambulante.  “ There is basically no educational market for documentary like in the United States, plus, very few independent art houses exist.” Fortes, 30 years old, is also one of the documentary programmers for the Morelia International Film Festival. Her twin sister Mara Fortes, a PhD student in film theory at the University of Chicago, also works at the festival.

In 2005, movie stars Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna (who first came into prominence in the 2001 breakthrough Mexican new wave narrative Y Tu Mama Tambien directed by Alfonso Cuaron) devised a plan to produce low budget films to counter the caricatures and  stereotyping of Mexicans in commercial Hollywood films.  To address this issue as well as the bottleneck on distribution and exhibition, they created Ambulante to promote the screening and production of documentary in Mexico.  

Ambulante carves out space for documentary in an economic context offering very few openings for independent Mexican cinematic visions to blossom. Transnational Holllywood films from TriStar, Universal, Warner and Columbia dominate 92% of Mexican screens.  87% of television is controlled by two broadcasters. 

Through a partnership with the Morelia International Film Festival and Cinepolis, the largest motion picture exhibitor in Mexico and Latin America and the fifth largest in the world, Ambulate programs Mexican and international documentaries for theatrical exhibition.  With its stadium seating, state of the art projection, excellent sight lines, and surround sound, Cinepolis removes some of prejudice against documentary in Mexico, where it is often confused with news or broadcast fare. 

In the United States, it’s hard to imagine a major exhibitor partnering with a nonprofit to get  demanding and aesthetically sophisticated documentaries into theaters. But with very few art cinemas left in Mexico, Cinepolis is the only game around.  Plus, the CEO of Cinepolis, Alejandro Ramirez, is a movie mogul cut from a different cloth than his counterparts el norte:  as well known internationally as an exhibitor as a human rights activist (he worked on poverty  for the United Nations Development Program), he is committed to documentary and  nurturing Mexican film.

“Develar realidades, confrontarlas, inventarlas, criticarlas, transformarlas”  (unveil realities, confront them, invent them, criticize them, transform them) is the mantra of Ambulante.  Ambulante, according to Fortes, does as much work programming as it does building audiences.  It works: their screenings at the multiplexes are jammed.They are bringing documentaries to different regions and audiences in Mexico, not waiting for audiences to find them.

For their 2009 season, Ambulante programmed a gutsy mix of international and Mexican documentaries. Burma VJ (Anders Ostergaard, Denmark, 2008), Emerald (Apichatpong Weerasethal, Thailand, 2007), Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog, US/Germany, 2007) and Invisible City (Tan Pin Pin, Singapore, 2007) suggest the range of styles and approaches, from compilation to observation to reenactment to meditation. Mexican documentaries included Presumed Guilty (Roberto Hernandez, Mexico, 2009)which questions the legal system and rules of evidence in Mexico,  Those Who Remain (Juan Carlos Rulfo, Mexico, 2008), an exploration of the impact of immigration on families, and Voices Silenced (Maria del Carmen de Lara, Mexico, 2008), an expose into the question of civil rights and freedom of speech in Mexico. 

At this year’s Morelia Festival, Presumed Guilty not only grabbed a long standing ovation and shouts of “bravo” but nabbed the top prize for documentary.

“The 60s and 70s filmmakers were heavily influenced by film movements in Argentina and Cuba as well as the international student movements of the period,” observed Fortes.  “Their works were much more interventionist than the documentaries we see today, which have a new form, often more observational or using different forms.”

In Mexico, a new wave of documentary has blossomed beyond the more typical stories of immigration, in such collaborative poetic films like Flores de Diesierto, made with the Huicholes people,  hybrid experimental, meditative documentary essays like El General , and La Cuerda Floja, a Spanish produced acutely photographed observational film about a traditional circus family.  All of these films screened at the Morelia International Film Festival this year. 

But there’s a rather disturbing gender divide in Mexican film production. Most of the Mexican narrative features and shorts at this year’s Morelia International Film Festival were directed by men.  With its smaller budgets and crews, documentary has been more accessible.  Lucia Gaja, Natalia Almada, Alejandra Sanchez, Daniela Ludlow, Guadalupe Miranda, and Eva Andjis are important figures in Mexican documentary with international visibility. 

But Elena Fortes foresees some possibility for change. In 2008, the Mexican government inaugurated a tax incentive to stimulate the Mexican film industry.  Still, most production is concentrated in Mexico City and Quadalajara, where the major filmmaking schools are located.

Despite the challenges of the gender divide, transnational corporate control of product, and the documentary moniker stigma, Ambulante has done something hard to imagine anywhere else in the world:  they’ve connected necessary and urgent documentaries, a major multiplex and large engaged audiences. 

They’ve dared to make the unimaginable possible. Ambulante.  Remember the name.

Narcotrafficantes, U.S. State Department travel advisories, and swine flu.

That’s the incantation I’ve heard repeatedly when I mention to friends and family that I am traveling to Mexico for a film theory conference and an international film festival.  Be careful, they warn. If you don’t get abducted, you’ll be stopped at a roadblock, machine guns rammed up your armpits. If you don’t get slammed with swine flu, the narcos will get you.

But another trio populates my cinematic landscape.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Guillermo Del Toro, and Alfonzo Cuaron.

These three directors broke open the Mexican New Wave in the early 2000s, a gritty, passionate, violent, visceral,  neorealist style mixed with complex –to-the-edge –of-discomfiting acting,  with films like Amores Perroes (Inarritu), Y Tu Mama Tambien (Cuaron)  and Pan’s Labyrinth (del Toro).

The industry trade paper Variety has pointed out that Mexico’s cinematic resurgence and seemingly endless innovations in documentary and narrative films of the last decade did not just hatch from the minds of artistes suffering alone. This movement has been fueled by a convergence of what Variety has euphemistically dubbed “protracted political, social, and economic crises” since the 1990s, the disturbances of the Free Trade agreement, and the shift  from one party to a sputtering, troubled democracy.  Recently, the Mexican government has provided tax incentives for production.

When  I attended the Morelia International Film Festival in 2004, a conversation I had with a Hollywood entertainment industry  insider underscored for me the intricate connections between a vibrant film culture and  politics.  This industry player joined me for breakfast in our classic colonial hotel on the plaza next to the magnificent cathedral.  He wanted, he said, to hang out with a “real film theorist.”

Of course, I was instantly flattered even though I knew that schmoozing people up is hard wired into the software of the entertainment industry. I never have minded this—I am often charmed by its civility since it is about as opposite of academia as I can imagine.

In Ithaca, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone exclaim, “gee, I’d really really like to talk to a film historian and theorist. Really, I would. Really. No lie..”   So  I asked Mogul X why. He said, “why not?"Then he let out a big chortles. "It’s a film festival," he explained. " You get to talk to people you wouldn’t normally meet and learn new concepts and words you can toss around at pitch meetings.” 

I shared that I usually don’t have breakfasts with movie moguls from Hollywood back in upstate New York,  since our commercial film industry went under almost a century ago in the late teens.

I asked Mogul X  why he was in Mexico.  “Talent raids,” he calmly replied.  “When you have political destabilizations, poverty, violence, huge international issues, uprisings, demonstrations,  passion,  and guts to do something new with narratives and camera angles and actors, you have a recipe for great filmmaking.”

I must admit, I really liked this guy. His honesty utterly engaged me.  He cut through the hype and the buzz that infects even the most serious festivals. There, at breakfast, was the history of Hollywood—always mining the globe for talent and markets, a practice that originated in the studio system of the 1920s with moguls like Carl Laemmle who journeyed back to Germany to pick up talented directors and actors for Universal Studios.

Talent raids and moguls aside, another trio actually resonates for me more deeply—and with greater anticipation-- as I wait at Newark International Airport,  sipping bad coffee from MacDonalds and typing on my new blue Asus netbook on the Boingo international wireless network used by transnational airport denizens. Around the corner from me is a Juan Valdez Café, with a large line drawing of what I guess is Juan the man himself, topped off by a sombrero.  Mexico for export.  Mexico shorn of its problems, its specificities and its images in a place-less transnational airport zone.

But then, there's a counterattack to the neutralization of Mexico for export: Natalia Almada, Dante Cerano, and Daniela Michel. 
 

These are the three people I’m looking forward to seeing in Morelia. 

Almada is perhaps one of the most talented documentary filmmakers in Mexico, exemplified in her film about narcocorridos and immigration, Al Otro Lado (screened with Natalia at FLEFF 2005) She’ll be at the Morelia Film Festival with her stunning new epic, El General, an evocative and probing feature documentary poetic essay on the Mexican Revolution and her family’s relationship to the complex political legacy of Mexico. 

Dante Cerano is one of the most original indigenous filmmakers in the world. A P’urhepecha from Michoacan state, his films opened my eyes to the variety of works--poetic and political and environmental--produced by indigenous makers.  We’ve programmed indigenous works at FLEFF ever since. 

And Daniela Michel is the effusive, gracious and cuttingly brilliant director of the Morelia International Film Festival who has the vision and the moxy to mix Hollywood movie stars, art films from Cannes,  indigeneous works, experimental cinema, and political documentaries together to rusrtle up a combustible brew.

This year, she’s done something that literally stopped me in my tracks:  she’s programmed 20 Romanian films, contending that Mexico and Romania share some similar trajectories. Christian Mungiu’s Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days was probably the most powerful and disturbing film we programmed for FLEFF’s 2008 edition.  It’s a rigorous, disciplined style of filmmaking that captures the intensities of being pregnant—and not wanting to be—in communist Romania before the fall.

Groundbreaking cinematic New Waves have erupted in both countries  with some of the most riveting, gut wrenching, disturbing, stay-with-you-for weeks films.  I am intrigued to see more and to figure out the connections between these big three.

No, not narcotrafficantes, travel advisories, or swine flu. I’ll leave those overwrought sensationalized beats to Fox and CNN.  I’m resolved to be “al otro lado”, working on figuring out a different triad:  international feature films, Mexican political documentaries, and indigenous media.

More on-the-ground reports from Morelia to come.

Blog written by Helen De Michiel, filmmaker and codirector, National Alliance of Media Arts and Culture, and Patricia Zimmermann, professor, Department of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts

We’ve decided to roll out Part II of our working papers on our open space documentary project so that folks at the Sepancine Film Theory Conference and Morelia International Film Festival in Morelia, Mexico—and readers of this blog-- can have access. We’ve included the Spanish translation as well in the document on the sidebar.

We wanted to share a bit more about our new research initiative, The Open Space Documentary Project.

We also decided  to open up the conversation further before we arrive in Morelia in central Mexico  this week. The comments on our previous posting have been really provocative. They have pushed us into some new thinking. We’ll be writing more from Morelia, Mexico, so stay tuned…Join the conversation and share your thoughts.

A WORK-IN-PROGRESS:

SPECULATIONS AND PRINCIPLES FOR OPEN SPACE DOCUMENTARY

1. If technology is now the primary shaper of human identity in a world of increasingly seductive illusions, how can we re-envision those illusions as a step to dreaming them in a new and different way?

2. Open Space documentary stimulates creative inquiry into how we practice empathetic dialogue: within ourselves, with other individuals, in a larger community, and across our broader society.

3. In this model, rapidly evolving technological interfaces liberate artists to explore new ways to frame community activities as creative practice, and weave them into a larger social fabric of history and memory rather than as simply products for purchase and consumption.

4. For Open Space documentary to be successful, a project team must agree with a group of commonly shared values that organize the project. They must also constantly articulate and test how much they can tolerate a horizontal process that allows inputs from a variety of different participants.

5. This model holds the promise to help in the building of strong local infrastructures by developing living archives of public memory and history that resist control by consumer and corporate agendas.

6. Open Space projects embrace a spirit of "amplitude" including:

* the intention to view a subject from every possible perspective;

* a curiosity about and compassion for the thinking of other people and other eras (i.e. holding deep historical perspectives and transmitting values across generations);

* the assumption that collaborations and interactions are reciprocally beneficial and open-ended.

7. Open Space documentary reanimates the processes and outcomes of co-creation among individuals and groups. These processes can be:

* Playful, reflective and capable of endless variety;

* Always moving between self-awareness and the external world of public interaction;

* Permissive of competing theories and systems;

* Protective of the capacity to learn and grow beyond original conceptions or storylines.

8. Open Space documentary equals a networked game structure with many potential outcomes that cannot always be planned for.

9. This model offers an environment for dialogue around a topic or issue that is not based on opinion or argument; but rather catalyzes possible next steps needed to connect, communicate and collaborate on human-scaled local actions.

10. Open Space documentary intentionally reclaims media technologies in order to re-envision interactive public, democratic and social relationships in all their subtle and complicated interactions.

Blog post by Helen De Michiel, filmmaker and co-director, National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture and Patricia Zimmermann, codirector of FLEFF and professor of cinema, Ithaca College

In the old world order, writing entered  public space like a piece of fine artisanal pottery, all the edges smoothed, the colors subtle, the shape pleasing and proportioned, the surface  carefully etched with perfectly balanced markings.  Precious, perfect, poised.

In the new world of “open space,” writing, we think, enters other worlds as an incomplete text inviting context and collaboration. It’s a space where ideas need other people and their insights to breathe, expand, get pushed.  It’s a process of letting go, in order to go somewhere else.

So we’d like to invite you to comment and respond to some of our arguments about Open Space Documentary below. We need you.  And we need to put these ideas into a larger conversation.

We’ll be presenting our ongoing research project, “The Open Space Project: Towards a Collaborative and Relational Documentary Practice” as one of the keynotes at the Sepancine 5th International Conference on Film Theory and Analysis in Morelia, Mexico, October 1-3, 2009. Sponsored by the Mexican Society of Film Theory and Analysis of the Metropolitan Autonomous University-Cuajimalpa (UAM-C), the conference is also part of the Morelia International Film Festival, one of the premiere film festivals in Mexico and Latin America. The festival runs October 3-11, 2009.

Oh…almost forgot…if you are a reader of Indiewire.com and Variety, you might be wondering what a film theory conference has to do with major world class film festival. The answer is simple:  in the exciting, explosive, and expanding space that is Mexican film, video and new media at the moment, practice needs theory and theory needs practice because the stakes are high, the politics intense, and the questions large.

We hope you will comment on some of our opening arguments, posted below.

WHY “OPEN SPACE” FOR DOCUMENTARY?

1.  It can restore social, human-scaled and local agency in new and unimagined ways. It invites new conversations and behaviors while connecting people.  It fights fear with pleasure and fun.

2.  It can convene people intentionally around and in real community spaces, offering an experience that reclaims patches of the social media environment from global corporatism.

3. It lives in and evolves through expansive networks, communities and clusters beyond traditional media distribution channels by experimenting with multiple versions and reaching out to contributors across disciplines and generations.

4.   It invites media makers and exhibitors to become “context providers” rather than “content providers,” reframing the more fluid movement and interconnections across disciplinary, epistemological and political boundaries.

5. It encourages attention to micro-territorial media ecologies where different discourses, practices and dynamically shifting elements will engage both convener and participants in unanticipated ways.

6. It acknowledges and works within a permeable space in which collaboration, contingency, horizontality, adaptability, decentralization and the migration across media platforms occurs frequently and with force.