#BlackLivesMatter Protest in Austin, TX on June 1, 2020

Dear friends,

Many people in our international community have asked us about what is happening in the US right now.

We attended last Monday's protest in our home city of Austin, TX to show solidarity, and witness what was emerging all across the US, and now the world.

This video is a glimpse of what we saw and heard. The text we have added represent our views as filmmakers and as an organization that is dedicated to peace-building through images and media.

We believe the first step towards achieving justice, healing and reconciliation is listening. We are committed to listening to the voices of our black brothers and sisters in the US who are suffering under ongoing systemic violence and police brutality. We are committed to showing up in solidarity with our bodies, our voices, and our cameras.

===

Các bạn thân mến,

Nhiều người trong cộng đồng quốc tế của chúng tôi có hỏi rằng chuyện gì đang diễn ra ở Hoa Kỳ vào lúc này.

Chúng tôi đã tham gia cuộc biểu tình vào thứ Hai tuần trước tại thành phố quê hương Austin, Texas để thể hiện sự đoàn kết và chứng kiến những gì đang nổi lên khắp Hoa Kỳ, và giờ đây là trên toàn thế giới.

Video này điểm qua những gì chúng tôi đã thấy. Những dòng chữ được thêm vào thể hiện quan điểm của chúng tôi với tư cách những nhà làm phim, và với tư cách một tổ chức cống hiến cho việc xây dựng hoà bình thông qua hình ảnh và phương tiện truyền thông.

Chúng tôi tin rằng, lắng nghe là bước đầu tiên để đạt được công lý, chữa lành và hoà giải. Chúng tôi cam kết lắng nghe tiếng nói của những người anh, người chị da đen của chúng tôi ở Hoa Kỳ, những người đang phải chịu đựng bạo lực có hệ thống và sự tàn bạo của cảnh sát. Chúng tôi cam kết thể hiện sự đoàn kết bằng chính cơ thể, tiếng nói và máy quay của chúng tôi.

A Storytellers' Manifesto For Today's World in 2020.

We at the School of Slow Media believe that our relationships to images, each other, to ourselves, and to our surroundings can lead to social and political transformation and ultimately a more peaceful world. But our relationship to media has been changing at an exponential speed. 

Images are everywhere — from our smart phones in our pockets to stadium-sized advertisements on the streets. According to the New York Times more than 1.3 trillion images were taken in 2018 than were taken in 2010. As the numbers continue to increase, we ask ourselves, have we learned to read the images? What images are we capturing? How were these images created? 

We wrote this manifesto in 2017 when we started our journey of global community of learners to challenge ourselves towards mindful media consumption and creation. After running 11 mindful media labs in five countries in the Asia-Pacific Region, resulting in over 50 human-centered micro-docs, our thinking and approach have expanded beyond the words written below. 

As we enter into 2020, we would like to open the conversation with those within our community and beyond — creatives, storytellers, thinkers, and listeners — to co-create a new manifesto that will serve as our collective guide moving forward.

---

The Storytellers' Manifesto We are not storytellers. We are human beings. We are not instruments of passion, purpose, or plot. We are more. Today's stories transform humans into pixels on a scrollable newsfeed. We become agenda-driven devices. Means for catharsis, escapism. 30 second social media...

---

Join the conversation and co-create a new manifesto with us?

Share your thoughts with us as comments below, email at hello@schoolofslowmedia.com, or suggest editing right on the Google Doc.

Our Partners in Hanoi, Vietnam

School of Slow Media is all about relationships—the qualities, collaborations, and understanding that comes through them. To that end, we have always strived to form partnerships along the way that matter, and we have come to cherish our partners as our number one asset. 

In Hanoi REMIX, we have collaborated with two prominent members of Hanoi’s creative community: Clickable Vietnam, and VUI Studio. 

Clickable Vietnam is a "World-Wise Agency for brands that market Vietnam to the world” and has headquartered in a beautiful lake-side villa in Tay Ho, Hanoi. They work tirelessly to serve their clients and their creative team is top-notch! We should know: four of their current and former team members joined REMIX, and Ai Vuong, our communications director, double-duties there as a communications consultant. Seeing our mission of raising capacity in southeast Asian creative communities, Clickable agreed to sponsor their staff’s participation in REMIX and gave them blessings for the three-day creative challenge, away from their usual work. 

VUI Studio is a brand-new venue for the Hanoi creatives to “work, meet, eat & drink." A beautifully appointed with care and attention to every detail, from construction, chairs, lighting and sound, to arts and books and coffee brewed inside, it's a delightful space and a perfect venue for working and learning. Their owners resonated with the REMIX's "slow media" message immediately, and offered us their space for the 3-day workshop.  

We are lucky to have such friends in the community, and are excited to extend our invitation to anyone interested in working with us, across the region. Get in touch if you are interested or know someone who might be!  

3 days of listening

Circles. That's what it boils down to. A concentric ring of people coming together to listen. 

REMIX Hanoi brought 14 people together for 3 days in June at the beautiful VUI Studio. Three teams from all over the world and with completely different backgrounds worked together to create 3-5 min documentary films from scratch -- in less than 48 hours of pre-production, production, and post-production time. 

What struck me the most about this group was how peaceful and in tune they all remained throughout the three-day process. Everything came together as intended: slowly, revealing itself gradually. Well, the last-minute changes and chaos are to be expected, as it should be in such accelerated programs! While each group was unique in their work process, they all shared a sense of calm and awareness. Our “points” (coaches)—Genevieve and Justin, SoSM alumni who flew in to help out with this REMIX, expressed their almost-bewilderment in one of our daily check-ins.

"I can't believe how they are so calm," they exclaimed. "I kept waiting for the drama, and nothing happened!" 

Teams were under stress, of course—they had to turn in their rough cut (the first draft of their work) by the end of Sunday for an audience of around 50 people who came to see the results. They were cutting footage, adding subtitles, cleaning up the sound right up to the last anxiety-inducing seconds. Luckily, due to our intention setting from the beginning, a sense of calmness permeated all of us.

We insisted in taking breaks of meditation.

We peppered our program with check-ins, short interviews, opportunities for listening.

We talked about the value of respecting our "participants"—the subject of their documentary work. Then we practiced respecting each other within the room. We began to SEE each other. And in that practice, learned to see ourselves. 

At the end of the program, all fourteen of us sat together in a circle, processing the whole experience as a group. We shared our innermost feelings, personal stories, desires and hopes, as well as sadness and disappointments in our lives, our world. But the most remarkable to me was how we started to listen together, a theme emerged, naturally, and ideas ran together. Before realizing it, we were talking as one.

More than anything the teams and Individual members had accomplished over this weekend, the moment of cohesion I felt with the group made me the most proud.

I'm very excited about the shift that we are causing. And more so, encouraged with each new encounter, each chance I get to listen to a new person.