What is it about?

Originally 6/4-07

We would like to explain more about why we’re doing this documentary! When we started this semester at university we all felt like doing something different than just writing the usual paper. Luckily MS (the Danish association for international cooperation) had just sent out an email to different universities in Denmark saying that they had ten scholarships for students wanting to do a documentary with the theme ‘democracy in everyday life’, and we could choose between going to Nepal, Guatemala or four different African countries, Uganda being one of them. The criteria for the documentary were to be innovative and different – to do something that the Danish people would find exciting to watch.

We spent a long time discussing different ideas and agreed that we weren’t interested in doing the usual documentary about Africa – only showing poverty, sickness etc. We believe that we can picture a diverse country that people aren’t used to seeing. Obviously poverty and sickness are also a part of Africa, but we want to do something that shows a stronger and different side also. As the 27th Comrade says in his comment on the “Back to high school” post, it would be to show the wrong Africa if we don’t show other sides than for example the poor.

Then we got in contact with Pernille (I’ve left Copenhagen for Uganda). She threw the idea of doing something about blogging at us, and we were immediately turned on. We spent a couple of weeks working hard on the application for MS, and it paid off. They had 27 applicants, and we were chosen as one of the 10 lucky winners. One of the reasons why we found this topic ‘blogging’ so perfect was, among others, that it gave us the opportunity to picture Kampala’s everyday life from the perspective of some skilled and resourceful bloggers and this by letting the bloggers tell their story. All this will of course be related to the context of ‘democracy in everyday life’. So what is it we want to do while in Uganda? Well, we haven’t yet decided exactly how to put the film together, since it depends on the persons that choose to participate. So we hope to find inspiration and maybe get our own ideas turned upside down when we are in Kampala or now for that matter. Any critique, advice or ideas for certain pictures, topics, facts of the community, interesting persons etc. are more than welcome – we really hope to get inspired by the experts, Kampala’s bloggers. But amongst other things we would like to film during the UBHH, if we’re allowed that is. And then we would like to interview and do portraits of a couple of bloggers, who have volunteered. Nokia has been kind enough to sponsor an N93 video phone so that the bloggers can film their everyday life. That way they become co-producers of “their” part of the documentary. Because our target group is young people we especially want to use local music as a means to make the documentary interesting. We’ve heard that hip-hop and RnB are very popular in Uganda, and it would be really cool if we could get our hands in some local stuff. If you have any ideas please write:)