Events

 

Broadcast

Broadcast differs from other Micro Cinemas in that it creates a "DIY community-based film unschool," where everyone simulteaneously plays a teacher and student. We create this educational environment by faciliating discussions between filmmakers   and audience members, covering a range of topics from the filmmaker's motivations and technical craft, to difficulties they experienced in producing the film and how they overcame them. At Broadcast, filmmakers have a voice and feel appreciated. Over time we have come to call this model of education the Positive Feedback Mosaic . What makes the model successful is the diversity in age, experience and economic status of our participants, with our youngest filmmaker being   9 years old to our oldest being   90, with people who have just picked up a camera for the first time to those who have been working in the field   of production for over 30 years. We also encourage filmmakers to work harder by having the audience vote on their favorite film of the evening. The filmmaker recieves the "Peoples Pick Award" certificate and a book on Filmmaking. Over the 5 years Broadcast has existed, we have been able to witness the growth of our regular attendees from their first films to winning awards at local film festivals such as the NWfilm fest , the Longbaugh Film Fest , the PDX Fest , and the Portland International Short Short Festival .

Who Does Broadcast Serve? Broadcast provides an opportunity for high school and college film students to branch out of their secular communites and unite with students from other film schools. It also is place where high school students can engage with college level filmmakers and make a decision about what film schools they want to attend when they graduate.

Broadcast is good for the non-school attending filmmaker. It provides an unformal structured "curriculum." It provides them inexpensive film training through positive feedback from seasoned proffesionals and exposes them to other like minded filmmakers that they wouldn't meet without the communal structure, uniting them in a way similar to the way a schooling structure does.

Working members of the production industry find value in Broadcast for many reasons. Many of them are at the height of their careers and they find purpose in giving back to the community and taking their place as elders. They can meet up and coming talent in Portland and hire them for their own projects. They can keep the pulse on the younger, revolutionary filmmakers, keeping their own films on the cutting edge. They can network with each other, have a place to hang out with friends outside of work in an arena of film appreciation.

Cultural Change

"The knowledge of how to build a nest in a bare tree, how to fly to the wintering place, how to perform the mating dance- all of this information is stored in the reservoirs of the bird's instinctual brain.   But Human beings, sensing how much flexibility they might need in meeting new situations, decided to store this sort of knowledge outside the instinctual system; they stored it in stories." - Robert Bly, Author and Poet

Stories have a powerful impact on humans. They contain detailed instructions for how to live on the planet. They are stored in our hearts and minds and are kept alive through the telling. Filmmaking is the cutting edge format of storytelling. Broadcast promotes cultural and environmental change by sending filmmakers and audience members home with a challenge   we call the Sacred Question . This question, different every month, is to be answered with a film of their own to be shown at the next screening. We have all heard the saying that "limitation creates art." The Sacred Question is limitation with meaning and sincerity. Our questions are designed to create personally meaningful films, showing filmmakers that they have a voice and the community of Broadcast wants to hear it. The Sacred Question is a seemingly subtle way of "getting people to think." Rather than bombarding people with sustainability, we casually make it part of everyday life. Some sample questions include: "why do we tell stories," "what does it mean to be an adult," and "where does nature begin and end."