Dream Job: Exchange Program
Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Kristinha M. Anding
Jenny Richards explores women’s empowerment through the international Broadcasting for Change Network.
On location in Lebanon, Mai Masri shoots In The Eye of the Storm, a film for Jenny Richards’ Broadcasting for Change Network,with a Sony HVR-Z1E/Z1P.
Jenny Richards found herself at a crossroads in the mid-1990s. The now-deputy director of the London-based Television Trust for the Environment (TVE) was eagerly anticipating the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, and she wanted the One World Broadcasting Trust of public-service broadcasters she worked with to take part in it. Her counterparts, she says, were not as enthusiastic. “Back then, most of the representatives of the broadcast channels were men, and I was one of two women in a group of 14 men. They just weren't interested,” she says.
So Richards and Mette Jansen of Norway formed a breakaway group. Along with broadcasters from 30 other countries, they produced their first piece under TVE's Broadcasting for Change Network. It was, Richards says, “a classic exchange project” that showcased 28 1-minute films addressing the problems of women's situations in their respective countries. It was broadcast that summer in 60 countries.
Since then, the network has produced five more compilations under a collaborative model in which participants give up the rights to their individual films in order to receive the entire program for broadcast. For the latest piece, Why Women Count, representatives from 41 countries convened for three days in London to discuss and decide upon the issues each producer would tackle. While TVE is the official secretariat of the program — organizing the conference, distributing bursaries to members from developing countries, compiling the films, and then redistributing the work to participants — the group makes all decisions collectively. Richards says the process is rewarding and collegiate but sometimes culturally tricky. “Everyone's film goes out to everybody else's country, so we have to work on how to make even a very short film on women's rights issues understandable in other cultures and contexts,” she says.
Another challenge for the group is to rein in the diverse formats one gets when dealing with many producers. For simplicity, TVE now requests that all participants turn in their final 5-minute films in Betacam or DVCAM formats.
Richards says Why Women Count is the network's best work so far. “We set out to do something that, quite honestly, has been an obsession of mine: to look at this whole question of women's empowerment,” she says. “The whole idea is to look at what an empowered woman is and how an empowered woman works to help other people's lives.”
For more information, visit www.tve.org/whywomencount.
