The center for media studies is an independent, not-for-profit organization dedicated to research-driven initiatives that enable policy makers to take informed decisions on development and social change to improve quality of life.
In its 4th year running, the CMS Vatavaran travelling film festival and wildlife forum is an amazing platform for creating awareness using the medium of film to communicate the most important aspects of our environment. The film festival and forum was organized from the 4th to the 13th of August ’10 in Hyderabad. The Indian Youth Climate Network was one of the key partners responsible for outreach to the youth in the city for their participation in the festival.
The festival and forum began with study tours to the polluted musi river, workshops of clay modeling, wastecraft competition and painting and photography competition for kids. This was followed by the actual film festival that began on the 11th with screening for school children in the morning and for college students and youth afternoon. Movies like zor laaga ke..haiya by Girija Joshi, Truth about Tigers by Shekar Dattatri were quite popular amongst the young audiences. Some of the documentaries from film makers across the country were in fact selected as a part of a call that CMS makes every year for enthusiastic film makers across the country to submit their work and after a few rounds of selection; they qualify for the film festival.
IYCN as an outreach partner helped facilitate the event through its volunteers as well. Volunteers from different colleges in the city helped the smooth running of the event. With the aid of stalls, all partner organizations got a chance to display their work! IYCN spoke of its current projects the Great Power Race along with the clay Ganesh idols that are being promoted for the Ganesh festival on September 11th. A workshop on climate science titled “Demystifying climate change” was given by Chaitanya from IYCN where discussion ensued on the basic science behind climate change and providing sound scientific arguments to debunk the debunkers.
Around 15 volunteers from IYCN were facilitating the entire event along with young friends from other organizations like Rock Works foundation and Avashya. IYCN was able to mobilize around 200-250 youth from across different colleges in the city across the three days of the festival!
The festival provided a good platform for members and volunteers of IYCN and its partner organizations to learn various skills of team work, event management, leadership and more. The youth facilitators picked up a thing or two about the various issues that plague the environment during some of the forums that were organized. The only downside to the festival was the quality of films itself that varied from one to another. A trial run of such films for a smaller sample audience of young children and adults could have given the organizers a good idea of how the audience would react before screening to kids from different parts of the country.
The festival is now travelling to Trivandrum, Ahmedabad, Patna and a few other cities in India. One would hope that such film festivals are organized more often at local level by different organizations and acknowledge the importance of film and media in communicating the most important message of our generation.