Community Screenings of "Life with the Río Santiago" Videos

With the hard work and dedication of 60 students, we are a day away from the culmination of our video workshops in El Salto/Juanacatlán and Guadalajara!  We have organized outdoor community screenings for this coming weekend.  If you're around, join us on Friday, the 7th of May from 8:30pm - 10pm in Parque de la Revolución in Guadalajara and Saturday, the 8th of May from 7pm - 10pm in La Plaza de Arriba in El Salto.  On Saturday, there will be snacks, artisans and two local bands playing from 7pm - 9pm followed by the screening of the videos.

The videos follow the theme "Life with the Río Santiago" and were all made by small groups of 3-6 workshop participants using FlipVideo cameras.  We guided the participants through the process of learning to use the cameras, how to tell a story and how to edit the footage into a 10 minute video.  For those of you who don't know, we conducted two sets of workshops - one in El Salto and Juanactlán with high school aged kids and the other with students of environmental engineering at a university in Guadalajara (ITESO).  

The students from El Salto/Juanacatlán are deeply affected by the contamination in the river - between the overpowering stench of the river that permeates the air to the overwhelmingly disproportionate number of health problems in their communities, it's something that no one there can escape.  The videos capture their community, concerns and desires for change from their own perspectives.  

A majority of the contamination in the river originates from the city of Guadalajara itself in the form of untreated human and industrial sewage.  Many folks in Guadalajara have no idea where their waste goes, let alone that it is causing catastrophic damage downstream.  With the help of one of their professors, Grupo Vida and Un Salto de Vida, we armed the students from ITESO with FlipVideo cameras and joined them on a tour of where their waste goes - from where it enters the canals on the outskirts of the city, through the industrial corridor all the way to the waterfall between El Salto and Juanacatlán.  Their videos grapple with the same problems from a much different angle.

All of the videos turned out powerful and provocative.  And according to the kids, the process proved to be transformative and empowering.  You can view all of the workshop videos here (sorry, most do not have English subtitles yet) and you can view the trailer for the community screenings below.