Seeing is believing: The Storyboard

	Introduction

	Joey's story

	Witness.org

	Joey and the Nakamata coalition

	Amateur video and the nightly news

	Handicams: the dark side

	Nakamata's struggle turns deadly

	Handicam footage in court

	Joey at Balatee Bay

	Technology and revolution

	Fast forward: The future

The Witness mission statement

Witness advances human rights advocacy through the use of video and communications technology. In partnership with non-governmental organizations and human rights defenders, Witness strengthens grassroots movements for change by providing video technology and assisting its partners to use video as evidence before courts and the United Nations, as a tool for public education, and as a deterrent to further abuse. Witness also gives local groups a global voice by distributing their video to the media and on the Internet, and by helping to educate and activate an international audience around their causes.

	Witness.org

It's been called the Digital Divide: the gulf between those who have the technology and those who don't. Witness is a New York-based human rights group that aims to bridge that divide by putting video technology into the hands of local activists around the world.

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Witness partners include Joey Lozano and Nakamata, a coalition of ten Indigenous tribal groups in the Philippines. Witness has worked with over 150 partner groups from 50 countries to use video to overcome political, economic and physical barriers, and to expose human rights abuses to the world via television, grassroots advocacy, and internet broadcasting. Witness was founded by musician Peter Gabriel, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and the Reebok Foundation.

As our film Seeing is Believing (SIB) begins, Witness is preparing to sending a digital video camera to Nakamata, a new Witness partner in a remote and dangerous part of the Philippines - Central Mindanao. Nakamata members will use the camera to document their land claims campaign. Soon, it will also record the violence of opposing forces, which escalates as the campaign progresses.

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SIB also follows Gillian Caldwell, executive director of Witness, as she visits a state-of-the-art technology trade fair in New York.

She's on the look-out for new communications technologies that could advance human rights advocacy work. There's tremendous potential that's emerged in the last ten years. We're trying to stay ahead of the curve at Witness. We are really trying to focus on what the potential and the possibility is, but a lot of it is just hypothetical at this point in time. The reality is that we are a long way from really being able to access and utilize new technologies on a grassroots level around the world, explains Gillian.

Next: Joey and the Nakamata Coalition