Ziv and Kinoy are part of a new wave of filmmakers handing camcorders and technical training to people and asking them to chronicle their lives. For “Teen Dreams,” they gave three teenagers-including a Philadelphia gang-banger and a former East Harlem drug dealer–each a $100 weekly stipend, a technical assistant and an endless supply of tapes. At the end of six or eight months, the teens will edit their own stories. “It’s very raw, very subjective,” says the Israeli-born Ziv, a pioneer in producing video diaries in America. “But out of it comes an intuitive, intimate story about somebody else’s world.”
While video diaries have enjoyed wide popularity in England, the genre is just now penetrating American TV, emerging in the wake of widely seen but somewhat random amateur footage like the Rodney King tape or the slapdash “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” PBS news anchor Charlayne Hunter-Gault is hosting “Rights and Wrongs,” a weekly magazine on human rights which uses video diaries and amateur footage from “video activists” from El Salvador to South Africa. This month Nickelodeon will air “Letters to the Earth,” a collection of “video letters” composed by children about their environments (a Scottish boy describes the Shetland oil spill; a group of Belizean children chronicle nursing a wounded pelican). And PBS will soon broadcast two sets of diaries from the West Bank and Gaza that Ziv produced: one by Palestinians, the other by an Israeli settler.
For their producers, video diaries and letters offer a rare chance to hand the production reins to the very people the news is about, bringing their stories to the screen free of the filtering interpretation of outsiders-that is, journalists. “It’s a radical idea because it redresses some of the inequalities about news coverage,” says Ziv. “It’s about Bolivians talking about Bolivians, and Albanians talking about Albanians”-with subtitles for the linguistically challenged. Ziv’s “Palestinian Diaries,” for instance, takes viewers inside the intifada. Here, an old woman trains a toddler to strike soldiers with a stick; a boy sneaks past Israeli soldiers to borrow movies to relieve the boredom of 24-hour curfews; and a young woman celebrates her engagement while PLO youths and Israeli soldiers skirmish outside.
For Frankie C., 18, a frustrated but eloquent Puerto Rican gang member from Philadelphia, the diary he’s taping for “Teen Dreams” is a chance to show a world composed of “a lot of angry people trying to survive.” In the moving, often lighthearted portrait of his gang, the Interracial Kings, Frankie films his surrogate family-the adolescent drug dealers, their girlfriends and children-joking, partying and waging snowball fights. “You’re blaming me for something I didn’t create,” says Frankie to his camera about the ghetto where he lives. “I just got caught in it.” Through the potent medium of video diaries, the viewer gets caught in it, too.
