Why film matters

by Dr. Robert Beckford

I started presenting films in the late 1990s because I believed that a struggle for social justice was taking place in visual media. It is now normative to presuppose that television, whether the evening news or dramas, play a strategic role in shaping how people perceive the world around them. One television genre where people expect to see a balanced representation of the world is documentary. But documentary is not without bias.

After all documentary is, ‘a creative treatment of actuality.’ So for me documentary is a tactic for challenging representation in the media, a resource for informing and challenging but never neutral has worked best for me when allied to social movements. It is a mirror and a drum. As a mirror it allows us to see ourselves in context, in the world that we have made. It is a drum because good documentary makes a noise, raises consciousness and creates a beat for people to follow. And I have seen at first hand how film can amplify that drum, through some of the films I have made over the past few years.

It might be calling for debt cancellation as reparation for slavery in The Empire Pays Back (2005) or calling to account multinationals or institutions like the IMF and World Bank for their role in promoting policies that harm poor nations, as in The Great African Scandal (2007). Both films continue to be used in various ways to advocate change on those issues.

Films are not enough – but when allied to campaigning, where we still have to knock doors, petition governments and sometimes even engage in non-violent direct action – we definitely enhance our effort to achieve lasting social, economic and political justice.

My inspiration for making films is a mixture of fear and agency. I fear the perils that stalk our planet but also have witnessed precious moments when the documentaries I make influence people and structures for the good.

Documentaries change things.

Watch Robert Beckford’s Great African Scandal

Broadcast on Channel 4 autumn 2007. A Wildcard Production in association with Christian Aid.