Is this the start of a demo­c­ra­t­ic film­mak­ing revolution?

At a time when gov­ern­ments the world over are aggres­sive­ly pur­su­ing neolib­er­al agen­das, fast strip­ping their cit­i­zens of any kind of mean­ing­ful polit­i­cal pow­er, World Film Col­lec­tive is on a mis­sion to restore the bal­ance. Estab­lished in 2007, WFC is a char­i­ty offer­ing free resources designed to teach peo­ple how to make films on mobile phones and then mar­ket and dis­trib­ute them via social media. The project began as the brain­child of found­ing mem­ber Alice Bragg, who explains, ​“I want­ed to set up an alter­na­tive media plat­form enabling voic­es that weren’t in the media to have the space not only to express them­selves, but to con­nect as human beings with peo­ple all over the world.”

The first iPhone was released in 2007, around the same time that high-res­o­lu­tion cam­era phones were becom­ing increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar, a devel­op­ment Bragg and the rest of WFC were eager to take advan­tage of. But not every­one was so sure. ​“Back then peo­ple thought we were mad,” Bragg admits. ​“I tried to explain that we were teach­ing peo­ple to make films on mobile phones and they gen­uine­ly thought we’d lost our mar­bles.” It’s safe to say their intu­ition paid off. In 2015, Sean S Baker’s Tan­ger­ine, a film shot entire­ly on iPhone 5, pre­miered at Sun­dance to rave reviews, cement­ing cam­era phone film­mak­ing as a legit­i­mate art form. Today the WFC web­site has over 250 films in its archive, with projects cap­tur­ing every­thing from life in the Calais ​“Jun­gle” to com­mu­ni­ties in South Africa’s townships.

The result­ing films are low-bud­get and just a few min­utes long, but nonethe­less incred­i­bly pow­er­ful, the rough­ness and low qual­i­ty of their pro­duc­tion only serv­ing to make them more inti­mate. Talk­ing about the Calais Speaks project, Bragg artic­u­lates its impor­tance in chang­ing per­cep­tions of the camp: ​“Many peo­ple who saw the films the Syr­i­an refugees made through our train­ing pro­gramme had a very dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ship with the Jun­gle because they’d only seen either the fear or the very depress­ing, upset­ting side. What the project was able to do was show these peo­ple as human beings with a whole spec­trum of emo­tions, not just the sad­ness we’re so used to seeing.”

The land­scape of cin­e­ma is chang­ing. Where tra­di­tion­al­ly the film indus­try has been the pre­serve of the priv­i­leged, cre­ative few, now organ­i­sa­tions like WFC are show­ing the way for a new gen­er­a­tion of film­mak­ers – with­out bound­aries and bor­ders. This is the future Bragg envi­sions: a demo­c­ra­t­ic world in which any­one, regard­less of their back­ground, can use art to con­tribute to the rais­ing of a col­lec­tive con­scious­ness. So that, rather than invad­ing coun­tries and killing peo­ple in the name of democ­ra­cy and free­dom, cre­ativ­i­ty and com­mu­ni­ca­tion become the tools by which to achieve those goals in a peace­ful and cel­e­bra­to­ry way.

The beau­ty of WFC is that lit­er­al­ly any­one with access to a cam­era phone and a com­put­er can get involved. Whether you’re a novice who wants to learn the basics, inter­est­ed in man­ag­ing a project, or an already estab­lished film­mak­er who wants to cre­ate some­thing with inter­est­ing peo­ple in your com­mu­ni­ty, the oppor­tu­ni­ty is there. For Bragg, WFC rep­re­sents a ral­ly­ing cry to the cit­i­zens of the world: ​“So many peo­ple believe they are pow­er­less. What we want to do is show peo­ple that they do have pow­er, that they do have a voice, and that they can use that voice to make a difference.”

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