Media Advocacy for Sexual and Reproductive Rights: A Script Development Workshop, a project by Puan Pandhita, Indonesia

Puan Pandhita’s organizational goal is to build critical consciousness about women’s sexual and reproductive rights to the society through visual media and build this network of consciousness among women.

Project Objectives:

• Capacity building in making multimedia (film or photo clip)  script with women’s perspective as part of advocacy strategy,
• To understand how to translate abstract concepts to simple and familiar words that will be easier to be delivered to men and women in any communities
• To raise awarenessofethical responsibilities in the process and substance of  creating visual media, to their subjects, their viewers, and their own artistic vision and production exigencies

Main Strategies:

• Capacity building for advocacy activists, offering a serial workshop comprising script writing, development, and production skills from women’s perspective;  to encourage advocacy film makers to value ‘feminist ethics’ based on women’s experiences, decisions, and participation as active agents of their own cultural or moral or political system
• Exploration and elaboration of the importance of ethics in eliciting and depicting life experiences and  traumatic experiences through visual media
• Showing  how a ‘tradition’ and ‘customs’canobjectifywomen and violate women’s rights throughfilm

They ran a ‘Script Development Workshop’, which consists of several activities:

• Gender and Sexuality discourse strengthening (unveil the taboos and cultural myths about woman’s body)
• Ice Breaker – discussion in pairs
• Body Exploration
• Body drawing
• Discussion about Sexuality  in your Community (e.g. taboo) and how does it bring impact to women
• Film discussion: based on a number of carefully selected films which were screened. These films were, a.o. about  various real life situations which draw out discussions about the issues, as well    as the “ethics” of the making of such films, even for advocacy…
• A “Film Clinic” - to learn to make scripts

Outcomes:

• The beginnings of a video advocacy community:  it is non-structural and consist of those who work closely to video advocacy , those who love video advocacy work, and those who work closely with local communities.
• The communities and the advocacy workers understand the principles of Women’s Ethics,  so that individuals or certain group of people that become the subjects of the film would not be victimized twice.
• The need to strengthen the women’s perspective and principles of Women’s Ethics  is spreading-  as participants are still maintaining their connections and sharing  information thru Puan Pandhita Facebook Group.
• Sharing of knowldg and skills continue as Puan Pandhita frequently sends them Video Production Plan Guide Tools and Documentary film References so they can develop their own film ideas and film statement into a production plan. 

An unexpected outcome is that the only male participant in the workshop,  who had never attended any video advocacy workshop like Puan Pandhita’s and had not yet own experience in making video advocacy has taken initiative to start a preliminary research about Women’s Rights Over their Womb in Adonara Island, Eastern Flores, to raise his community’s knowledge of reproductive health and rights.