On Saturday 7 September 2019 I attended the 18th Annual Youth Film Festival in Charlottesville. A nonprofit organization called Light House Studio presents this.
I like that there is an organization which provides a channel for youth to produce and publish films locally. Because I am a media access advocate, I liked less that all the films had a tag “copyright Lighthouse Studio”, which communicates that the nonprofit organization acquires the copyright from all creators in the program. I do not necessarily mind them acquiring the copyright but they also assert a conventional copyright license after the manner of a film studio, and I would prefer that either they use a free and open license or permit creators to retain the copyright. The other context I have for my view is that I have seen repeatedly that nonprofit organizations of this sort invest no budget, expertise, or consideration of the long-term management of their media collections, and typically they lose the cataloging metadata of content which they produce. The usual outcome is that the media becomes mostly undiscoverable in a few years, when I would rather it be archived for the long term. This is all speculation based on my past experience, observations, their copyright notice, and their lack of published archiving procedure.
I enjoyed the works. I liked the two documentaries more than the others. One was interviews with local Charlottesville students who were immigrants from Central or South America. Those students said that people in Charlottesville harassed them either for being Latino or speaking Spanish. This seems believable to me because as a recent move here I see strange racism and prejudice here continually. Local people typically express the idea that Charlottesville is a friendly place but they compare it to other towns in the region, which people describe as either ignorant or sometimes proundly hatemongering. I still get surprised when I see historically oppressed demographics here, women, black people, Latin, LGBT+ and the rest act deferentially to an oppressive norm.
Another documentary had students visit local nursing homes, ask residents where they would like to virtually visit, then put virtual reality headsets on them. This was after the genre of video for exposing someone to technology not of their generation. The people in this video had little awareness of virtual reality and were moved by the experience.
Young people are capable of meaningful media creation and publishing when they have the opportunity to do so. I expect that participants in the program take great inspiration for years from the work they produce. Probably the video production for these films happens in a week, so as a life experience, this entire program seems high impact at relatively low cost. I recognize that a complicated nonprofit network must exist in a community for this to work, including funding to the host organization but also to the youth organizations which make the student participants ready to join these programs.
Some of the homes and locations featured in this program were evidence that at least one young person on the production team was from a wealthy family. I try to notice when there is a nonprofit community resource which offers benefits within easier reach of the wealthy as compared to the underserved. I appreciate that the host organization in this case is seeking diversity, but of course diversity costs money and the rich kids’ families pay the participation fee.
The entire event was great and would compare favorably with anything similar.