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Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada. Edited by Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker, and Ezra Winton. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2010. 574 pp. ISBN: 9780773536623.
The Fogo process is named for the National Film Board's (NFB) Challenge for Change's (CFC) signature projed on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, in the late 1960s, which helped to inspire the use of documentary video for sodai diange With fishing in dedine and unemployment at 60%, Fogo Islanders, divided by ancestral and religious differences, had resigned themselves to government plans to relocate them away from their island Once CFC was able to shift to video from film, video's immediate playback capability enabled producers to consult with partidpants and re-shoot scenes as desired The (then new) Portapaks made it easier to move from outport to outport, sharing "instant" feedback from residents in one place with those in another, animating community discussions to overcome barriers and discuss collective solutions. Through time and the video-making process, Islanders organized themselves and persuaded the federal government to help them remain on the island by supporting a fishing cooperative and marketing board.
The Fogo process, which was perhaps CFCs greatest legacy, was the result of the producers being ddermined not to repeat the mistakes of CFCs precursor, Tanya BaIlantyne's The Things Í Cannot...