Patricia Zimmermann: Collaboration is a Bloodstream of any Project

Open-space documentary is a valuable method in the communication for development toolbox. It does not only engage, but also empowers communities. Professor Patricia Zimmerman highlights projects worldwide where the power of user-generated content has done the work.

Patricia R. Zimmermann is a Professor of Screen Studies in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York, USA. She is also a Co-director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, a major international festival housed at Ithaca College. At the American Independence Film Festival in Kyiv, Ukraine, Patricia Zimmerman shared her research in C4D  giving a lecture titled “Open-space documentary: Participation and New Media”.

Concepts of the open-space documentary:

• Small places:  such documentaries zoom in and focus on a small place, rather than aiming at shooting grand epic movies.
• Designing encounters: it is not a director, who creates an image of/about a subject. This type of documentary makes communities come, talk and decide how they envision a production process.

• Inviting: maximizing engagement is an integral part of the open-space documentary.

Global Practice

Precious Places Project is a community-based storytelling project, which has been running for 25 years. Scribe Precious Places Community History Project brings small places on the map and makes residents see their own neighbourhood in the new light. Its goal is to remap Philadelphia by filming life of each single bloc of the city and putting new spots to the To Visit list. Through a dialogue communities in the neighborhood  decide which story must be told and in what way. There are over 300 movies already produced thus raising multinational voices of the city’s residents.

Engage Media

This Southeast Asian “antiyoutube” is an online video sharing site, which brings up issues of civil rights, environmental destruction and social injustice in the whole region. The team says that it “demystifies and provides strategies for the effect use of video distribution and engagement technologies” by connecting people who can film and produce with those who have a story to share.

Triangle Fire

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Manhattan, New York City, in 1911 was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city as over 200 people suffered. 100 years after, in 2011,  Triangle Fire Open Archive, a crowdsourced istoriography, was launched in order to commemorate victims of the catastrophe.  Open archive invited labour units, students and artists to generate content for the Open Archive.

"When there is nothing, imagination and collaboration do the work," 
says Patrician Zimmermann about this initiative, which helped to gather evidence 
not accessible before. 

The Good Life

How does it feel like to be in Latin America right now? This is the main question of The Good Life, a multi-part video project composed of over 360 video interviews with pedestrians on the streets of twelve cities in Latin America shot in the timeframe of three years. Archive of the videos produced gives options to search though in accordance with cities, age, gender and questions asked to the respondents. A video portrait of the continent has also resulted in articles, texts and illustrated books.

The Cotton Road project

From South Carolina to Shanghai: how does textile industry function? What are the consumption patterns that we are not necessarily aware of?  The collaborative project  The Cotton Road tracks supply chains throughout the world through human stories and reveals how globalization and consumption makes us more connected.

Image via Flickr