Full Title: "Unconventional Coverage: The Message and The Means"
Awards: WINNER, Best Documentary, Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema's Festival of Independents, 2001
Broadcasts: PBS WHYY in Philadelphia, FreeSpeech TV - available on The Dish Network
This feature-length documentary, created and produced by video collective BiG TeA PaRtY, is a comprehensive look at the protests at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 2000. Dismayed by the local media's coverage of the protests, which treated them as a nuisance, spending more time telling people how to avoid traffic jams than exploring why people would take to the streets to express dissent, BiG TeA PaRtY set out to show the world what the protests were really about. Besides a thorough investigation of the plethora of voices and issues throughout the course of the week-long convention, the video also reveals a carefully targeted attack by the police dept that stripped many of the marches of their visual messages, and also how the police rounded up and arrested leaders and facilitators to make the protests seem more disorganized and random. There is discussion of the planning and organizing that goes into a large-scale protest, the tactics of jail solidarity, interviews with people who were arrested and mistreated, interviews with ordinary people about their opinions of protesters and politicians, mention of the necessity of independent media to cover such events, and so much more! Basically this documentary is a primer for the modern protest movement, and a refreshingly ground-up view of the reasons for and importance of dissent in the political life of the U.S.
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