Andrea McDonough Reviewer Reviewer 1 Again, I'm really pleased to welcome Sonja Nanzig. And I would like to let you know that in the very early beginning of our planning for this conference, there were a lot of discussions and we discussed how can we approach to the topic. And I guess very soon it became clear that if we can cope to cope with the question to cope with the challenge of how can we describe or how can we design some ideas of a future of non-commercial television we were convinced that we have directly to look into the challenges of our times so we are living in times of crisis multiple crisis have directly to look into the challenges of our times. So we are living in times of crisis, multiple crises. We are living in times of a lot of social, societal conflicts. And then I was talking to a friend of mine, I really adore as a headhunter in my life. And I was talking to her, we need someone for our conference who is really living and working in the hotspots we would like to talk about, in the hotspots of our time. And she told me there's only one activist you have to invite her, that's Sonja Nanzig. So now she's here, Sonja Nanzig. So now she's here, Sonja Nanzig. Sonja Nanzig, just for a brief introduction, is now living in Athens, with Polish backgrounds, even some German speaking backgrounds. That's why she can follow the German speaking discussions. Co-founder and CEO of an institute or an organization called Refocus Media Lab Foundation, which provides refugees in Greece and Poland with media creation skills. She earned master degrees in sociology from the University of Silesia and in international relations from the Jagiellonian University. It's a Polish university. Yes, it's still in Poland. And before entering the humanitarian sector and work, she was working in Serbia and Bangladesh and also for the European Parliament. So there's this… My previous life. Yeah, your previous life. An interesting link to each other. So now she will talk about the question, nothing about us without us. Young refugee media creators attempt to influence the mainstream narrative. So it's up to you. You have 30 minutes. Hi, welcome. And at the beginning, I really have to apologize to all of you because my computer was misplaced at the airport. So you will not see the pictures I presented, but we have some visuals for later. So yes, we will be talking less theoretically, more on a case study of my foundation that I will present to you, as a potential model for non-commercial televisions and non-commercial media to work on certain new standards for journalism in the future. Before we start, I will have to take you a little bit on a journey back to how we started and how this whole concept of citizen journalism in our foundation started. So, as Martin already said, I worked in politics before, basically my whole life, and at some point I had this change of heart and decided to go into humanitarian aid. I literally left everything and decided okay, now or never, this is the time, and I volunteered and worked with several organizations that dealt with humanitarian crisis in the world, mostly in the context of the refugee crisis. And starting from 2016, I traveled to several countries, so-called hubs of refugee crisis, to see how the situation looks like there. And wherever I went, at my current husband, we discovered that there is a gigantic gap in humanitarian aid. Namely, education and skills training for young adults, for refugees who are teenagers, and people who would like to maybe change their career. It was so obvious that everything is needed in humanitarian aid. So from blankets, food, water, some basic shelter, everything was needed and all the money would go to those basic supports. But nothing was really oriented into the future. Literally nothing. So if there was any type of education in those refugee camps, it was education for children between five and 12. And this is a standard everywhere in refugee camps, wherever you go. Governments are definitely not doing enough, but this is definitely for a different type of a debate. But what we saw is that whenever you're 12, 13, 15, 20, you're basically getting nothing. You're stuck in refugee camps with very little support. whenever you're 12, 13, 15, 20, you're basically getting nothing. You're stuck in refugee camps with very little support. You are detached from many of your peers. You're detached from education. You have basically no role models with you because so many of our target groups, those young people, were unaccompanied minors, meaning boys and girls who made this very dangerous journey to reach Europe alone, completely. And they were as young as 12, 15. The youngest person who came alone, if you can imagine that, that came, that we met in Greece, was eight. A person who came from Afghanistan the whole way to Greece was eight years old. Of course, he got in touch with some groups, so there were some adults around him, but no parents, no siblings, nobody with him. We thought that it was a terrible, first of all, problem. It is a massive problem, not only for people who are coming to Europe, but this is also a problem for Europe, because what are you going to do with those big groups of people who have no education, who didn't have any role models to shape their ideas and values, and who will have to somehow enter a job market if they want to survive. But if they have no education, if they have no job experience, how are they going to actually do that? And in places where we worked, the governments were not active in this area. Not only were they not providing training or education, they were also not providing any type of integration. People were stuck in refugee camps with zero information how the world in Europe looks like. On the Greek island of Lesbos, which became one of the hubs of refugee crisis, which you may probably heard about because it was all over the news, people were stuck in the camp for two, three, even more years before they would get their papers. And they were not allowed to leave this camp. They had to stay. At some point, they were actually allowed to leave the camp, but they were not allowed to leave the island. They were in so-called border procedure, which means wherever you register, wherever you come first, you have to basically stay in this place. So they were not even allowed to travel around Greece. They had no idea how the world looks like outside the camp, and they had no idea actually how to work in Europe. They would have to start competing with their European counterparts for jobs, and they had actually no way how to do it. As an outcome of that, they would, after receiving asylum in Europe, they would leave the camp. In Greece, you have to leave a camp or any type of housing you're getting after one month, and you stop getting any support from the government, which at this moment, by the way, is 75 euros a month. So that's the whole support a person gets. But you have to leave the camp and you have to leave your house after a month after receiving your asylum. So what you're going to do, you're suddenly entering this new world. You have really no idea how or where to go even. So most of the refugees would simply go into the low-paying physical work, which in Greece, where we work every day, is usually picking up oranges or olives or working in some kind of big warehouses, moving stuff. Usual rate is two euros an hour. We thought that this is a terrible waste of human potential. Because as everybody else, those young people in refugee camps, they had their visions how their future should look like. They had their dreams of whom they want to become. So we decided that a very simple solution that we tested into places could actually give them training in media and because my husband specialized in this he thought I can actually start training them immediately so we did this we ran those two pilot projects we saw that there's big interest there's need for that and we thought that media is actually this one area on the job market where you do not necessarily need a diploma from a fancy university. If you build a really good portfolio, and if you have experience, you can actually apply for jobs that will give you some benefits in life, right? That will allow you actually to build a career. So we started training people in several different areas, like photography, filmmaking, storytelling, graphic design, sound engineering, with this hope that people will eventually be able to get internships and then jobs at, for example, Dorf.TV, right? Like, we didn't think that, oh, we're going to train now the future Tarantinos or anything like this, although we have some really great movies made by our students. But the idea was simple. Teach people the technical things behind media so they can actually enter a job market. We didn't want to solve the whole refugee crisis. We just wanted to change some individual situations. And everything was going very well until COVID hit the whole world. And as you can imagine, in refugee camps, it was even worse than everywhere else because everybody went on a lockdown, the camps as well, and all of those things that you, that we all heard at the very beginning, so how to tackle COVID, wash your hands for at least 20 minutes with hot water, soap, sanitize, and so on, it was laugh out loud, being honest, in those camps that not only never had hot water, they didn't have regular water for half of a day, soap was a shortage, hand sanitizers came at the very end of the crisis. So when our students were locked in those camps, nobody could enter, nobody could leave, they decided that nobody really cares about them. And I hear a lot this statement that, oh, COVID actually showed that we're all equal, that it touches everybody. Well, I'm sorry, that's really not what we saw. Because yeah, it touched as a disease everybody, but it shows this inequality in the world because not only some nations got vaccines first and some didn't, but also like really simple things, hand sanitizers, masks, like the refugees in the camps, if they wouldn't make the masks themselves the whole COVID time, they wouldn't have any. And it's not about the fancy now you have with lots of different slogans and so on. No, it's like about anything basic, put a tissue on your mouth to cover itself. And we're talking about living in a very dense communities, right? So our students started thinking that, well, it is really unfair that it's completely undocumented and unreported about. That we're talking about everything that is happening related to COVID, but not about what is happening in the camps. So we started producing their own journalistic pieces. And we found actually a partnership with one German organization and one, I don't know if I'm allowed to say names, so I will say like an ice cream company, a very good one and very socially engaged. And we started producing these pieces of media that would inform public audience about what is going on in those camps. And it gave our citizen journalists this feeling of being very empowered. Suddenly, after being stuck in those camps, not allowed to leave anywhere, not having any services, suddenly they thought that they have a voice. So we organized extra trainings for them, master classes, of course, everything online. We bought multiple hotspots in the camp so they can actually connect and they can send their footage to us so we can put them online. And as an outcome of this, suddenly the big media started thinking, well, that's actually an interesting topic to cover. Somebody just saw the project online and was like, well, maybe we should do this. We already covered everything related to COVID and several months in they were looking for new topics. But the problem was they couldn't come to, that was actually the Greek island of Lesbos. They couldn't come. Everything was closed. Lockdown, fully secured by army and police. So they got in touch with us and asked if we would be willing to prepare some media for them. And our citizen journalists, of course, feel very flattered because we're talking about The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC, well, basically, you name it. Everybody, bigger, smaller pieces. So we started working with those media. As an outcome of this, we had a group of fully employed, full-time citizen journalists, basically working on different news pieces every single day. And then we thought, well, there is an issue with this. There were actually several issues with that. You're working with those big commercial media, and they have their requirements. They want to show things in a certain way. But they also believe that their way of working is the model that cannot change. So, for example, all the work our students and citizen journalists have been doing was for free. And sometimes it was a raw footage just sent to those media. and sometimes it was a 20-minute piece that they produced and was shown on those really gigantic platforms. So it's like, it is really unfair that you're not getting paid for the work you've been doing basically the whole day long, and there's nothing there for you, just the fact that, wow, you got credit at BBC. We even had to fight for getting the credit for individual people. So we did this small blackmail to those big media saying, look, guys, we did the whole work for you. You couldn't send your correspondents whom you would pay great money, but you didn't pay our citizen journalists. I was like, yeah, but you know, they're more of like sources rather than journalists. I was like, well, the fact that they are reporting from the field means that they are correspondents, not your sources. And they're reporting from the field because they know it, and they know who to talk to and they're just like yeah but maybe so we're just like okay you want the footage let's agree on payment and after a while they're just like okay okay okay we're gonna pay so this is how it started that people who lived in refugee camps and some of them didn't even have asylum status yet, started getting money for their work with those big organizations. So they would get one gig, second gig, and it would go farther and farther. But the other issue was, as I told you, that many of those big media had this very clear vision how it should work, what we should present. And they would send us this shooting list of their requests. It was basically like a shopping list almost of what they want to see. And some of those footages were very, very intimate. And in the eyes of our students, there was something wrong with them. I'll just read you an example that I found in my email. So, shooting this from one of Turkish televisions. We would like a picture of a child playing in dirt, a 15-second clip of a sad woman in front of a tent preferably crying, short interview with a camp resident, we would prefer them to say that the life there is unbearable. And you can imagine the reaction of our citizen journalists who are members of this community. And they thought, well, either we stage this or we're just entering this very intimate sphere of our co-residents in the most vulnerable times of their lives. Who would want to be filmed when they're crying in front of the tent, right? So it's like there's really something wrong about this. We need to have more to say in this area. And they decided that they will mostly start creating their own pieces. But then BBC came into place with their big vision of how we can collaborate. When they came, it was right after a fire of the camp. And if any of you heard about this big fire of Moria camp on Lesvos, you know that it doesn't exist anymore. There were two days of fire that completely destroyed the camp. And for two weeks, everybody was just living on the street. And this time, when many journalists, it was actually in this period when the lockdown went a little bit down, so many journalists came to the Lesbos Island to report on that, but they needed fixers and they needed some local support. So they turned into us and produced several pieces with us. The largest of them was the piece from BBC regarding that it was an investigative journalism about what actually happened during this fire. And it actually was nominated for several awards. But when we showed the piece, the final outcome of the piece, because of course BBC kept the rights, how to present it in the end, some voices of our citizen journalists were very negative. And even one of the students said, you know what, I really expected more from BBC. We could have done it better. And they decided that they will present their voice in this debate of how to work with those big commercial televisions and what needs to change. As an outcome of this, they made a movie called Nothing About Us Without Us, which pitches this idea of engaging with citizen journalists, but also bringing some standards for this discussion. And having that said, I would like to play you the teaser of this movie. It's four minutes long, so you will see some background stories of the fire of Moria. So just heads up that it may be a little bit disturbing and of the process, how our students and citizen journalists were working on it. Even you are in the hardest conditions you have this chance to improve yourself and make your future better. The European Union as a whole needs to be determined and united. We are not going to come to modernity. They are firing tear gas at everybody. We need to have car banks everyday. As you people are hungry, yeah for sure people are hungry. What's going to happen to them? Everybody's going to be cold. Go, go, go! Thank you. We were students. We had no idea that we were going to be a citizen journalist one day. We were just coming to classes to learn new schools just like the new students right now. And we were interested and motivated by taking photos every day, having the camera in our hands and doing something that normally a person couldn't do in Ireland. It's been over a year now since the fire destroyed Moria. Since the media shifted away from Lesbos. Our collective hope was that we wouldn't be forgotten all over again, but that's exactly what's happening. Terima kasih telah menonton! You just saw the teaser. There are two versions of the movie. One is 20, one is 33 minutes long, it's now in a festival cycle. And it started raising a debate of how we're actually working as media with citizen journalists. Because as we see it, it is an opportunity. an opportunity and why I am pitching this concept to you right now is that I believe that the non-commercial televisions actually have a real chance of finding and being the engine for a new standard in journalism and not only in the way we handle working with citizen journalists and people who are not working directly with our news feeds, but also in changing the narrative. So going from the beginning, changing of the standards means paying attention to who's working with you, how do we treat them fairly, and what are their specific competences and needs? Because this can truly be used as an advantage and something that differentiates the non-commercial televisions from the commercial ones. The second thing about changing the narrative. Our citizen journalists were very, very disappointed in working with the largest media simply because they are interested in the fast news. They're interested in those shock news. This is what sells right now, right? You go to a place of crisis, you show the misery, you leave. And we literally had people who would fly to the Lesbos Island, stay for literally 24 hours and leave, and didn't go deep into stories. And they were able to produce a 30-minute piece on something just after being there for one day. And they did a fast research, and that was it. Our citizen journalists lived this research. So they were a very valuable source of information, but they can be so much more than just a source. It's so much more valuable if you hire a person who is actually inside a camp or inside any other place and can provide you not only with the footage, but the inside knowledge of what is going on and we started pitching an idea of an impact journalism impact journals meaning being true to the story for longer than just this short period of time when you're coming for a crisis for a catastrophe something that just happened like the fire of Moria, staying with the story, following it, and by this, trying to bring a change to the protagonists of your piece. And this idea is not resonating with the big commercial televisions. They have to go through so many layers of discussion, and every of those layers, every of this level can bring some resistance to the idea. And as much as we're trying showing this movie in many other places, everybody's pledging that it's absolutely a fantastic idea and you really have to diversify and bring those new voices, not really much is changing in the world of media. And the world right now is more diverse and more intertwined than ever. And newsrooms have to actually show this diversity as well. A few days ago, I'm just coming from The Hague, from Movies That Matter Film Festival, and I had the pleasure of being at a private screening of a movie by Platon, the famous photographer who takes pictures of politicians. And he actually made a movie about refugees. And at the end, he said something that really stayed with me. It's a very simple concept that probably has been repeated many times, but in the context of his movie, when he said, you know what, we all have an individual and a communal response. Each of us belongs to some kind of a community, and this community of media makers also has this communal responsibility and we have to use it wisely. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Sonia. I guess that's a lot of heavy stuff. To proceed, I would like to bring your discourse, your very impressive discourse, I have a lot of images in my mind now, I would like to bring it in a relation to our Dorf TV realities because what you have, what you underlined, like addressing non-commercial media activists to be considered, as you call it, an engine for new standards for journalism, I guess we already, and Dorf TV already existing, I don't know, about 12 years, we are already implementing this notion of being an engine for new standards, for new comprehension of journalism. Totally different, the other way around, not commercial, not to produce shock news, as you call it. shock news as you call it. And we are also working with refugees, amongst them some people who to probably intercultural differences, language problems, different backgrounds, different point of views, how we look at things. Yesterday I had an interesting talk with Sissi Nalomomanzi, who we'll talk about later on. She just showed me the number six and if you turn it around it's nine. But it's the same number. It's just a question of which perspective you look at it. And that's I guess one of our most interesting experiences. But nevertheless we have to be honest, there are some difficulties. How did you cope with this? We had no... I will start differently. It is difficult. I'm not going to lie to you. I'm not going to tell you like, oh, please, every news feed declare right now that you're going to have at least one black person, at least three women, and at least two people with a refugee background. Obviously, it doesn't work like this. It will not. And the big thing is that it requires time, patience, and unfortunately, money as well. patience and unfortunately money as well. Because when you work with people with a refugee background especially, they have to get used to working in your culture, but also they will probably need some additional training. And we saw it with our citizen journalists. They were producing fantastic news feeds, but they also needed this extra push when it comes to working with big media, because you work in special environment, they needed the training on different type of cameras, different sound recording devices, and so on. And you as an employer need to provide it. And this is actually one of the problems with smaller TV stations, smaller media, simply do not have this budget. That's why we were very much pitching at the beginning to the big commercial ones, because it can be part of their CSR. But as I said, it's going extremely slowly. And on the other hand, there is this notion that if something is produced by citizen journalists, it's a low-quality footage. And we've been proving this notion very wrong for the last several years since we exist, because first of all, we're providing high level training. What we're doing is a very intense course for anybody who have a refugee migration background. Actually, it's a program open to everybody who wants to learn, but we are focusing on on pitching to this community and we are producing this training and providing this training but we're also providing tools for people to work on and we have something called filmmakers fund when everybody can apply actually to have up to 50 percent of funding for any type of media equipment funded by our foundation. So we're trying to build this line towards going to professional work environment. But yes, it is difficult. And the cultural differences, they're definitely there. And we can see it at every moment. I don't know if you know it, but if you show the OK, like, OK, cool sign, right? It's very bad cursing in Iran and in Afghanistan. It's like you're showing the middle finger to the person, right? So I didn't know it, and'm very, like, okay person. So it's one of those things. And it requires really bringing those people together, but we have to start somewhere. Where the borders will not close as much as some people would want. And we will be only more and more diverse. So we have to find those models, how to work through training and through getting to know each other better how to actually cooperate and coexist in working places. So now looking into the audience are there any questions any remarks otherwise it's up to me to proceed. Now some of your ideas or some of your perspectives. Oh, sorry, Christoph. Just one question. Do the participants of your classes get a kind of certificate? And do you have the experience that this is accepted by certain companies? Yes. The simple answer is yes. They get the certificate. The program is divided into four months training. So after each four months, you're reaching another level. And it has been accepted. It has been accepted at universities. We have the first people, very young people, who have entered German universities, and it was accepted. Even more so, strangely, it was accepted by German asylum services as a proof. It's a very strange thing, as a proof that this person can be a valuable member of a society. I really hate it, because humanitarian aid is not about whether you can be a valuable member of a society or not, because it's about protection from harm. But showing certificates like this have been actually this extra benefit for them. So yes, simple answers, yes. Well, as I told you, some of your remarks and some of your perspectives reminded me of this idea of how can the subaltern speak. That's I guess one of the most crucial questions. And how can we make them speak in a sense of the way you underline this to give some sort of education trainings to provide them with necessary skills in doing media, becoming a media activist, a citizen journalist. But how can we really make them powerful? Being powerful, getting powerful is more than just teach media competence. It's more than that. It's to get really an active part of your society, or in a plural sense, of societies to participate, to fight and to get the respect you earn. That's a long way. that's a difficult way. What is your approach, what are your experiences? Because that will be one of the main questions in the future we are talking about during this conference. If we want to deal with it and the work, the involvement of migrants, refugees, that is the sound of the future, actually. So the empowerment here comes with the creative side of it. The moment you produce your first media piece, when you're a refugee, living in a camp, waiting in a line for absolutely everything, a line for food, a line for blanket, a line to see a lawyer, a line to see the asylum officer, the moment you produce the media piece for the very first time and you see it, it changes so much. And I heard it from absolutely every one of our students. They said that it gives them this power that something is there, stays, that suddenly their identity changes. Because so many of them think that like, I'm a refugee and this is so overwhelming that this basically defines my whole life. It's not. It's something that happens to them, but they're also mothers, fathers, doctors, mechanics, have so many other identities, and now they become media creators. And journalism and filmmaking are those two that really bring the most power into people because they allow them to really raise their voices. And we actually were trying to shift their focus from the refugee issues. We wanted them to produce media pieces on anything they want. We even have always this time during the course when they can report on anything they want, but refugee issues. You want them to think about themselves slightly differently. You want to record some short movie about a love story? Just do this, right? So we were thinking about changing this perspective of themselves, but also changing the perspective of them in general audience. There is a reason why the foundation is called Refocus, right? We have to refocus how we think about refugees, but also they have to refocus how they think of themselves, what they're capable of, what they can do, and how their voice can be heard. And the best way, actually, when it comes to media, to bring those voices to the broader audience is actually to allow them a creative power of making specific media pieces. Not to just hire them. This is of course a very important part of it. But allowing them to decide on certain media pieces that they actually have competences in, that they are experienced in. Because it's really, really not the same if a Western journalist just travels to a refugee camp and reports on this for a few hours and goes away. I saw this, you know, this dissonance between when you see something on the news and you're just like, well, I'm there. I'm working on this island for the last several years and you see it coming from a Western journalist and you see it coming from the citizen journalist. It's completely different. It really lacks meat, I would say. It's just flat. When those stories coming from the camps are so different, they're so much deeper, so much powerful, and because of that. So yeah, I would say that the voice has to be heard more, because it's not only about bringing people with refugee migration background to our newsrooms, but also allowing them to sit at the table, to actually pitch and to bring their voices to the decision-making process. Yeah, thanks a lot. I'm again looking into the audience. There is no hand raised, so I'd like to suggest that we will make a point. Now we're already advanced in time. So now we have our break. Noon. I just can say enjoy your lunch. And we are back at 1.30, I guess, with the lecture of Sissi Nallomanzi. I'm already really curious. So see you soon. Thank you very much.