Filming a different view of the world

IN A narrow street in Swansea's docklands, behind Morgan's luxury hotel, the choice of Hollywood stars, a revolution is taking place inside the Old Telephone Exchange.

And the revolutionaries or Undercurrents, as they call themselves, want to recruit you to the struggle.

"Promoting non-violent direct action in order to bring about environmental and social change using the media - that's our aim," says veteran video activist Paul O'Connor. And that's a big task.

Set up in 1993, Undercurrents hosted its annual international political video festival, Beyond TV, in Swansea in November.

Open to all, the festival sought to turn ordinary people into video campaigners and offered inspiration and guidelines to anyone who wanted to project a different view of the world from that offered by the mainstream media.

The Old Telephone Exchange seems an appropriate home for a group that aims to challenge how we currently receive our news.

Undercurrents shares its headquarters with a mixture of other educational and environmental bodies, so you must first pick your way through a communal kitchen and boxes of organic vegetables to reach its nerve centre.

Its cramped but tidy office is packed with their weapons of revolt - a number of cameras hang from pegs, shelves are stocked with campaigning DVDs and there are neat piles of the group's small orange revolutionary manifesto.

The Video Activist Handbook was written by founder-member Thomas Harding and sets out the tactics to be used by members.

It calls the camcorder a powerful political instrument and defines an adherent to the cause as "someone who uses video as a tool to bring about social justice and environmental protection."

The group began in London by campaigning against the Criminal Justice Bill, which it saw as an attack on raves and squatters and which also limited the right to protest.

But Undercurrents soon found itself working with a whole range of marginalised people unable to get their voice heard through established media channels.

In the past, it has worked with Romany groups and protesters against new road construction.

Over the years, new media technology has made it easier to present such alternative voices.

"The camcorder is accessible to ordinary people who wouldn't have had a chance to make programmes in the past," says co-ordinator Helen Isles.

"Now, for example, we have a solar pack adapted to power cameras and laptops so that we can be ecologically friendly and operate in the field more easily. We're at the cutting edge of these changes."

Undercurrents has a dual role of making programmes for campaigns and teaching groups the skills to make their own output.

Whether Welsh peace campaigners, eco villagers in Pembrokeshire or Palestinian farmers protesting in the Gaza Strip, they have all been helped by this charity.

However, mainstream media outlets have frequently been loath to show such subversive material and Undercurrents has been forced to seek alternative distribution methods. Here, once again, new technology has come to its aid.

The digital revolution in television has meant the growth of numerous small stations such as the Community Channel, where their material can be aired.

Even more radically, "pass it on" or "peer to peer television" means that material can be distributed via the internet.

But, using a more old-fashioned technique, it has returned to the early days of the film industry by taking its own cinema out to the people.

"We regularly put up a screen out in a muddy field during a music festival, but our most exotic location to date was in an old army tent by a waterfall in Iceland," recalls Isles.

Undercurrents has developed a screening policy to reel in the punters as well.

First, it hits them with radical animation or pop videos by rap artists, before introducing the heavier political material.

Its members describe themselves as vagabonds and are currently working to convert an old caravan for their travelling film shows.

"All people need is a story they want to tell and plenty of enthusiasm," says Isles. "We'll work with them and teach them the skills."

Poor old Lenin had to make do with a hand-cranked printing press. These revolutionaries have more modern weapons - and they're not afraid to use them.

For more information on Undercurrents, phone (01792) 455-900 or visit www.undercurrents.org