LAUNCH STATEMENT

The Triple ‘D’ Festival is being launched at a time when there is no known festival or development programme in existence to support diverse Documentary, docudrama and dialogue in the United Kingdom. Various communities and arts organisations have been engaged offering narrowly based festivals, especially to celebrate the South Asian ‘Bollywood’ or the output of Indian film industry as well as the offering of a rich programme of cinema from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. There is immense talent on offer and successful production of a wide range of contributions suit all tastes from these sources of film and moving image for television. Indeed, ‘Fillum’ was one of our own festivals and from 1996 to 2000 we were able to make our own contribution to the scene by promoting it in London and the regions.

During the last few years I have wanted to create a platform which would bring together new and emerging forces in film from all over the world but which would also offer opportunities to young people to enter a rich environment for critical debate and to make their presence felt not by offering the money spinning opportunities created by film but by the power of their ideas and their convictions relating to community development and social change. Didactic media is a corruption of ‘didactic’ and its focus will be constant – promoting and learning about ‘change’ as perceived and presented by the emergence of powerful docudrama and documentary in the widest meaning of diversity in the classroom, at places of work, in the streets and in the communities of the world. It will aim to educate and inform as much as to entertain but the focus on the impact of documentary medium will be paramount.

Docudrama and documentary is an enticing medium. The views and experiences of successful documentary and docudrama makers need to reach a wider audience. Documentary appears to have been relegated to television and education. Many people with a sense of mission in using the film and moving image have been forced to produce low budget films in order to reach known and unknown audiences but documentary offers much more at an even lower cost. It is the very essence of internet enabled communication and more needs to be done to encourage new producers to adopt documentary and docudrama as a medium of choice.

Please see the new programme at http://tripleDfestival.wordpress.com and http://documedia.ning.com