25/10/2005

An international TV and video festival of work that challenges the establishment view of society is being held at Swansea Marina on 25-26 November.

The BeyondTV 6th international video festival is a charity event with a diverse programme of short movies, video workshops, documentaries, music videos and animation. This year the festival hosts the first Media Activist Awards (>MISTY<) presented to some of the people using media to bring about positive change.

How can media bring about positive change?

A spokesman said today: " For 10 years Undercurrents has
been winning awards for training people how to use video for social change. This could mean gathering evidence of pollution by factories, editing empowerment images for minorities or producing their own news and views of events. Giving the media back to the people rather than leaving it only to the outside 'professionals'.

"We have found that most news tends to lean towards the viewpoints of the establishment rather than from the people. Undercurrents set out to challenge and change that trend. We work with radical media producers who have tried to get their films broadcast but for various reasons are ignored by mainstream Tv. Good examples is that it took us 4 years to convince Channel 4 that they were missing out on many inspiring film makers. We convinced them to commission 2 programmes as a showcase in 1997. Many of those film makers now work in BBC, Channel 4 and other media organizations.

"However things are still the same and years on we still have to show TV makers what they are missing."