A video run-through of the interactive documentary Obrero. Obrero ('worker') is an independent multi-platform documentary project. It tells the stories of Filipino rebuild workers temporarily migrating to Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand after the earthquake in 2011. The interactive documentary can be explored at https://www.obrerofilm.com/. Norman Zafra is a Filipino journalist-documentary maker and currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Auckland's Media and Communication Department. He has worked as producer, writer, and director of award-winning Philippine TV documentary programmes such as Reporter’s Notebook and I-Witness.
Filipino caregivers, after working long hours in the wake of the Christchurch earthquake, are now being denied work permits.
The Philippines government is asking for extra compensation for its citizens killed in the Christchurch earthquake, a similar plea is being made by China.
An audio recording of Tim and Sol O'Sullivan's interview for the Church in the Quakes Project. The interview was conducted by Melissa Parsons on 16 November 2012. At the time, Tim O'Sullivan was the Central Council President for St. Vincent de Paul Society in Christchurch. Sol O'Sullivan is a member of the Christchurch Filipino Society.
A transcript of Tim and Sol O'Sullivan's interview for the Church in the Quakes Project. The interview was conducted by Melissa Parsons on 16 November 2012. At the time, Tim O'Sullivan was the Central Council President for St. Vincent de Paul Society in Christchurch. Sol O'Sullivan is a member of the Christchurch Filipino Society.
Avonhead Park Cemetery Interment Site. Central plinth. Inscription reads: "Etched in our City’s memory, never to be forgotten. The City of Christchurch" in Filipino.
File reference:
CCL-2012-02-27-AvonheadParkCemeteryIntermentSite-February-2012 DSC_028.JPG
From the collection of Christchurch City Libraries.
This thesis is a creative and critical exploration of how transmedia storytelling meshes with political documentary’s nature of representing social realities and goals to educate and promote social change. I explore this notion through Obrero (“worker”), my independently produced transmedia and transjournalistic documentary project that explores the conditions and context of the Filipino rebuild workers who migrated to Christchurch, New Zealand after the earthquake in 2011. While the project should appeal to New Zealanders, it is specifically targeted at an audience from the Philippines. Obrero began as a film festival documentary that co-exists with strategically refashioned Web 2.0 variants, a social network documentary and an interactive documentary (i-doc). Using data derived from the production and circulation of Obrero, I interrogate how the documentary’s variants engage with differing audiences and assess the extent to which this engagement might be effective. This thesis argues that contemporary documentary needs to re-negotiate established film aesthetics and practices to adapt in the current period of shifting technologies and fragmented audiences. Documentary’s migration to new media platforms also creates a demand for filmmakers to work with a transmedia state of mind—that is, the capacity to practise the old canons of documentary making while comfortably adjusting to new media production praxis, ethics, and aesthetics. Then Obrero itself, as the creative component of this thesis, becomes an instance of research through creative practice. It does so in two respects: adding new knowledge about the context, politics, and experiences of the Filipino workers in New Zealand; and offering up a broader model for documentary engagement, which I analyse for its efficacy in the digital age.
Red Cross aid worker Rosemarie North is in the Banten province of Java where authorities have lifted the alert level for the Anak Krakatau volcano to its second-highest level. She has worked on and off for the Red Cross since 2003 in all kinds of situations, including post-conflict in Sierra Leone, landslides in the Philippines and Papua New Guinea, refugee camps in Chad, earthquakes in Nepal and Christchurch, and tsunamis in Southeast Asia and Samoa. [image_crop:72149:full]
Rising disaster losses, growth in global migration, migrant labour trends, and increasingly diverse populations have serious implications for disaster resilience around the world. These issues are of particular concern in New Zealand, which is highly exposed to disaster risk and has the highest proportion of migrant workers to national population in the OECD. Since there has been no research conducted into this issue in New Zealand to date, greater understanding of the social capital used by migrant workers in specific New Zealand contexts is needed to inform more targeted and inclusive disaster risk management approaches. A New Zealand case study is used to investigate the extent and types of social capital and levels of disaster risk awareness reported by members of three Filipino migrant workers organisations catering to dairy farm, construction and aged care workers in different urban and rural Canterbury districts. Findings from (3) semi-structured interviews and (3) focus groups include consistently high reliance on bonding capital and low levels of bridging capital across all three organisations and industry sectors, and in both urban and rural contexts. The transitory, precarious residential status conveyed by temporary work visas, and the difficulty of building bridging capital with host communities has contributed to this heavy reliance on bonding capital. Social media was essential to connect workers with family and friends in other countries, while Filipino migrant workers organisations provided members with valuable access to industry and district-specific networks of other Filipino migrant workers. Linking capital varied between the three organisations, with members of the organisation set up to advocate for dairy farm workers reporting the highest levels of linking capital. Factors influencing the capacity of workers organisations to develop linking capital appeared to include motivation (establishment objectives), length of time since establishment, support from government and industry groups, urban-rural context, income levels and gender. Although aware of publicity around earthquake and tsunami risk in the Canterbury region, participants were less aware of flood risk, and expressed fatalistic attitudes to disaster risk. Workers organisations offer a valuable potential interface between CDEM Group activities and migrant worker communities, since organisation leaders were interested in accessing government support to participate (with and on behalf of members) in disaster risk planning at district and regional level. With the potential to increase disaster resilience among these vulnerable, hard to reach communities, such participation could also help to build capacity across workers organisations (within Canterbury and across the country) to develop linking capital at national, as well as regional level. However, these links will also depend on greater government and industry commitment to providing more targeted and appropriate support for migrant workers, including consideration of the cultural qualifications of staff tasked with liaising with this community.
This article is a critical commentary of how political documentary embodies the traits and functions of alternative journalism. I explore this notion through Obrero (‘worker’) my independent documentary project about the labour migration of Filipino workers to Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand, after the earthquake in 2011. This article maps out the points at where the theories and practices of alternative media and documentary intersect. Analysing political documentary as a format of alternative journalism has links to the long tradition of film and video production as a tool for social critique. As a form of practice-based research, Obrero falls under the rubric of alternative journalism—able to represent the politically marginal sectors of the polity and report on issues underreported in the mainstream press. This article concludes that a distribution plan that is responsive to fragmenting audiences works best when alternative journalism no longer targets a niche but transborder audiences.
This research is a creative exploration of transmedia’s ability to offer up a model of distribution and audience engagement for political documentary. Transmedia, as is well known, is a fluid concept. It is not restricted to the activities of the entertainment industry and its principles also reverberate in the practice of political and activist documentary projects. This practice-led research draws on data derived from the production and circulation of Obrero, an independent transmedia documentary. The project explores the conditions and context of the Filipino rebuild workers who migrated to Christchurch, New Zealand after the earthquake in 2011. Obrero began as a film festival documentary that co-exists with two other new media iterations, each reaching its respective target audience: a web documentary, and a Facebook-native documentary. This study argues that relocating the documentary across new media spaces not only expands the narrative but also extends the fieldwork and investigation, forms like-minded publics, and affords the creation of an organised hub of information for researchers, academics and the general public. Treating documentary as research can represent a novel pathway to knowledge generation and the present case study, overall, provides an innovative model for future scholarship.
This paper reports on a service-learning public journalism project in which postgraduate journalism students explore ways to engage with and report on diverse communities. Media scholars have argued that news media, and local newspapers in particular, must re-engage with their communities. Likewise, journalism studies scholars have urged educators to give journalism students greater opportunities to reflect on their work by getting out among journalism’s critics, often consumers or citizens concerned about content and the preparation of future journalists. The challenge for journalism educators is to prepare students for working in partnership with communities while also developing their ability to operate reflectively and critically within the expectations of the news media industry and wider society. The aim of this project has been to help students find ways to both listen and lead in a community, and also reflect on the challenges and critiques of community journalism practices. The project began in 2013 with stories about residents’ recovery following the devastating 2011 Canterbury earthquakes, and aimed to create stories that could contribute to community connection and engagement, and thereby resilience and recovery. The idea was inspired by research about post-disaster renewal that indicated that communities with strong social capital and social networks were more resilient and recovered more quickly and strongly. The project’s longer-term aim has been to explore community journalism practices that give greater power to citizens and communities by prioritising listening and processes of engagement. Over several months, students network with a community group to identify subjects with whom they will co-create a story, and then complete a story on which they must seek the feedback of their subject. Community leaders have described the project as a key example of how to do things “with people not to people”, and an outstanding contribution to the community-led component of Canterbury’s recovery. Analysis of student reflections, which are a key part of each year’s project, reveals the process of engaging with communities has helped students to map community dynamics, think more critically about source relationships, editorial choices and objectivity norms, and to develop a perspective on the diverse ways they can go about their journalism in the future. Each year, students partner with different groups and organisations, addressing different themes each time the project runs. For 2016, the programme proposes to develop the project in a new way, by not just exploring a community’s stories but also exploring its media needs and it aims to work with Christchurch’s new migrant Filipino community to develop the groundwork for a community media and/or communication platform, which Filipino community leaders say is a pressing need. For this iteration, journalism students will be set further research tasks aimed at deepening their ‘public listening’: they will conduct a survey of community members’ media use and needs as well as qualitative research interviews. It is hoped that the data collected will strengthen students’ understanding of their own journalism practice, as well as form the basis for work on developing media tools for minority groups who are generally poorly represented in mainstream media. In 2015, the journalism programme surveyed its community partners and held follow-up interviews with 13 of 18 story subjects to elicit further feedback on its news content and thereby deepen understanding of different community viewpoints. The survey and interview data revealed the project affected story subjects in a number of positive and interesting ways. Subjects said they appreciated the way student reporters took their time to build relationships and understand the context of the community groups with which they were involved, and contrasted this with their experience of professional journalists who had held pre-conceived assumptions about stories and/or rushed into interviews. As a direct consequence of the students’ approach, participants said they better trusted the student journalists to portray them accurately and fairly. Most were also encouraged by the positive recognition stories brought and several said the engagement process had helped their personal development, all of which had spin-offs for their community efforts. The presentation night that wraps up each year’s project, where community groups, story subjects and students come together to network and share the final stories, was cited as a significant positive aspect of the project and a great opportunity for community partners to connect with others doing similar work. Community feedback will be sought in future projects to inform and improve successive iterations.
