It is said that a picture is worth 1,000 words.
Witness is a human advocacy group dedicated to making sure those "words" don't fall on deaf ears.
A representative from the watchdog organization -- which uses video as a medium to publicize human rights abuses and affect change -- visited the University's Annenberg School for Communication last night.
Witness' Communications and Outreach Manager Suvasini Patel traveled to campus from the organization's Brooklyn, N.Y., headquarters at the invitation of Annenberg professor Katherine Sender as part of the Politics of Representation screening series.
Witness partners with other human rights organizations worldwide to get cameras into human rights problem areas such as Sierra Leone, the Philippines and the U.S. territory of Saipan.
The presentation featured the screening of two films and a question-and-answer session.
The first film that Patel showed was a compilation of clips from various documentaries to which Witness has contributed. Some of the many topics of the excerpted documentaries included appalling living conditions at a Paraguayan psychiatric hospital, the grueling conditions at a textile factory in Saipan and the destruction of Peruvian rainforests and its subsequent impact on indigenous peoples.
Patel explained that while all of Witness' films are documentaries, a film's specific style can vary depending on its intended audience.
The second of the two films Patel showed was a complete documentary focused on the impact that a camcorder can have on human rights at the local level.
The film profiled, among others, a Filipino man who brought a camcorder to the country's displaced indigenous Nakamata people on the island of Mindanao. They combined to film the group's often violent struggle to regain ancestral tribal lands that former Philippines dictator Marcos and his cronies seized from them. The lands were taken for use as sugarcane plantations.
As the Nakamata faced violent retribution for their attempts to regain their territory, the video footage of the violence compelled the current Filipino government to act on the group's behalf.
In the documentary, Witness Executive Director Gillian Caldwell described how the organization helps bridge the "digital divide" and give a global voice to local groups. "Video," she said, "is the infallible witness," and therefore is a compelling tool in the fight for the alleviation of human rights abuses around the world.
Witness was founded in 1992 by a group of visionaries, the foremost of whom is musician Peter Gabriel. In the wake of the uproar over the March 3, 1991, video clip of Rodney King being beaten by the Los Angeles Police Department, Witness' founders realized video's strong potential as a means of affecting change.
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