The only media currently reaching most remote mountain communities arrives via shortwave radios that offer no opportunity for community output. This media isolation is linked to a lack of political representation, transparency and accountability made worse by the fact that mountain people often do not speak the colonial languages of policymakers. Furthermore, illiteracy impedes communication even among regional communities. These barriers make political participation difficult at all levels of governance.

Given the strong traditions of oral knowledge transmission in mountain communities, video statements with translated subtitles and multilingual web capability are powerful and relevant tools in navigating the linguistic and geographic barriers these communities face to political representation on local, national and international levels. Videophones are practical, economic, and effective tools to record the content of these videos in remote areas. To these ends, Mountain Media will provide the training, equipment, and business strategies necessary to make videophone media production a self-sustaining tool in two indigenous communities in Peru: Pisac, a small town located in the Sacred Valley outside of Cusco; and the Communities of Q’eros, an extremely isolated mountain community in the high Andes.

To accomplish its goals in each community, Mountain Media will arrange tutorials between local film professionals and two members of each community to train them as community media experts. Once trained, the media experts will integrate weekly classes into the local school curriculum at local production studios powered with solar panels and connected via satellite Internet. Mountain Media will produce a clear protocol for replication in other mountain areas, hopefully one day leading to an exchange of self-expressed experiences and ideas among the global community of mountain peoples.

In addition:

For the last decade, Earth Island Institute’s Sacred Land Film Project (SLFP) has used journalism, organizing, and activism to rekindle reverence for land, increase respect for cultural diversity, stimulate dialogue about connections between nature and culture, and protect sacred lands and diverse spiritual practices. Its films have been shown to the US Congress to support indigenous rights legislation and broadcast nationally by PBS. SLFP has recently begun to support community video production through a partnership with Mana Studios and its ongoing work in enabling remote indigenous communities to produce their own video media.

Mana Studios has been working toward these goals with the Pisac and Q'eros communities in Peru since March 2007, and pioneered work using mobile videophones to produce community videos in March 2008 with The Emerging Lens Initiative, a video education exchange between youth in the United States and Bhutan. Mana Studios works closely with local NGOs in the communities it serves in order to assure that its work respects local contexts, supports regional economies, and is sustained long beyond the duration of its video workshops. To this end, SLFP and Mana Studios are committed to pursuing methodologies that transfer knowledge and equipment directly into the hands of skilled community experts.

Locations