Patricia Zimmermann, Charles A. Dana Professor of Screen Studies and Director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, delivered an invited talk at Whitman College entitled "The Ukraine War and the Necessity of Independent Media" on November 7, 2022. The talk was on Zoom and open to the general public.
The talk discussed the media ecologies of independent media in Ukraine during the war such as the collectives Babylon '13, Freefilmers, and W.A.W.; the independent news organization Kyiv Independent; President Zelensky's daily Zooms into parliaments, congresses, festivals, and awards ceremonies around the globe; and the profusion of crowdsourcing, information sharing, and fighting disinformation on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Telegram. The talk situated this independent media ecology within the long histories of Ukrainian cinema, starting with VUFKU, a vertically integrated filmmaking organization in the 1920s, Dziga Verto, Dovzhenko, and the current strategies and debates around the Dovzhenko Film Archive.
Zimmermann also ran a workshop for undergraduates on November 8 on the ways in which independent media during the war circulate a ground-up, people-centric representation that counters international commercial media representations with images produced by amateurs and those in the conflict, a merging of the local and the global in new ways.
