December 2, Wednesday, 5.50 pm 

1.  Dr. Larisa Mikhaylova

RSACS Academic Secretary, Journalism Department,

Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia

Welcome speech 

2. Maniko Dillon-Barthelemy

Educator, Executive Producer/Director in Southern Belle Production

Louisiana, USA

Social Awareness and reporting (documentary filmmaking)

The speaker will talk about how teaching social responsibility and awareness leads to a better reporting, how her students seek and pitch ideas for social issues films and reporting, and how a single documentary can change the law.

 3. Alberto Galina Mendoza 

Vancouver-based documentary filmmaker, Canada

 Social-issues documentaries: life in front of the camera and beyond

The speaker will explain why he started making social-issues docs, how his team built the relationship with their characters, how tough and how important to make social-issues films and what happens after the cameras are gone.

Maniko Dillon-Barthelemy

Educator, Executive Producer/Director in Southern Belle Production 

Filmography: 

Unlikely sex offenders, film’s description: https://newsheels.blogspot.com/2011/04/unlikely-sex-offenders-film-screening.html

PURPOSE: This session examines the steps taken throughout documentary production to produce a powerful, unnerving, provocative film like “The Unlikely Sex Offenders” that informs the target audience and impacts public policy.

METHODS: Two of the more than 800 Louisiana women who are registered sex offenders after being convicted of breaking the state’s 1805 Crime Against Nature law give gripping details of life as they live with the stares, stigma, and setbacks that define them because of the conviction. A state lawmaker who introduced legislation to change the law during production of the film goes through the history, hypocrisy, and hard road to amending Louisiana’s constitution.  Louisiana State Police explain their role in maintaining the state’s sex offender registry. All perspectives for the film are on-camera in an unscripted, content relevant setting. Weeks of field legal research at Louisiana courthouses, on and off-camera interviews, meetings with potential participants, field research, filming, location scouting, writing, and editing over a six month period culminated with the film screening at the Obama Administration’s Human Rights Film Festival in Washington, DC.

CONCLUSION: The 2010 documentary added the human touch Louisiana lawmakers struggled to make in their efforts to draft and pass legislation that made breaking the 1805 Crime Against Nature law by solicitation, punishable by up to six months in jail, a maximum fine of $500 or both, for a person’s first offense. It changed the punishment from a felony to a misdemeanor, as it relates to adults soliciting adults. The offender must register with police as a sex offender if he or she has been convicted of soliciting a minor on a first offense or after a second conviction of soliciting a crime against nature of an adult. Previously, breaking the Louisiana 1805 Crime Against Nature law as a result of soliciting an adult, meant if convicted, the offender possibly faced hard time in a state prison, was required to register as a sex offender for a minimum of 15 years, and the words SEX OFFENDER were capitalized in red letters stamped on the convicted offender’s driver’s license or state ID, regardless of the offense.

Alberto Galina Mendoza 

Vancouver-based documentary filmmaker 

Filmography: 

The Heart of the Children: Supporting Children with Refugee Experiences (https://vimeo.com/95486159)

This short doc was commissioned by the Immigrant Services Society of British Columbia, as an educational video-documentary for teachers in the Vancouver region with a duration of 10 min approximately. The purpose was for the teachers to learn about immigrant children recent arrivals and integrated into the education system, to understand these kids were probably dealing with trauma and how this is usually identified and how art therapy can help them deal with their emotions better and at the same time allowing better integration into Canadian education system and culture. The author uses kids’ art and poetry and their experiences to drive the mini-doc.

Million Dollar Med$ (https://www.milliondollarmeds.com)

This is a long in-depth documentary about rare diseases in Canada. The film won the Jack Webster Awards for the best health sciences journalist work. This project also was awarded the Edward Murrow Awards in New York, the USA for the best international small news organization.