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Freedom of Expression Awards 2016 from Index on Censorship on Vimeo.
A female journalist training reporters from within war-torn Syria, and a group busting online censorship in China are among this year’s Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards winners.
The winners, announced on Wednesday evening at a gala ceremony in London, also included a Yemen-based street artist and campaigners from Pakistan battling internet clampdowns.
Awards are presented in four categories: arts, journalism, digital activism and campaigning. The winners were: Yemeni street artist Murad Subay (arts), Syrian journalist Zaina Erhaim (journalism), transparency advocates and circumventors of China’s “Great Firewall” GreatFire (digital activism) and the women-led digital rights campaigning group Bolo Bhi (campaigning).
“These winners are free speech heroes who deserve global recognition,” said Index on Censorship CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “They, like all of those nominated, face huge personal and political hurdles in their fight to ensure that others can express themselves freely.”
Drawn from a shortlist of 20, and more than 400 initial nominations, the winners were presented with their awards at a ceremony at The Unicorn Theatre, London, hosted by comedian Shazia Mirza. Music was provided by Serge Bambara – aka “Smockey” – a musician from Burkina Faso who won the inaugural Music in Exile Fellowship, presented in conjunction with the makers of award-winning documentary They Will Have to Kill Us First: Malian Music in Exile. The award was presented by Martyn Ware, founder member of the Human League and Heaven 17.
Actors, writers and musicians were among those celebrating with the winners. The guest list included actor Simon Callow, academic Kunle Olulode, and journalists Lindsey Hilsum, Matthew Parris and David Aaronovitch.
Winners were presented with a framed caricature of themselves created by Malaysian cartoonist Zulkiflee Anwar Haque (“Zunar”), who faces 43 years in jail on sedition charges for his cartoons lampooning the country’s prime minister and his wife.
Each of the award winners becomes part of the second cohort of Freedom of Expression Awards fellows. They join last year’s winners – Safa Al Ahmad (Journalism), Rafael Marques de Morais (Journalism), Amran Abdundi (Campaigning), Tamás Bodoky (Digital activism), Mouad “El Haqed” Belghouat (Arts) – as part of a world-class network of campaigners, activists and artists sharing best practices on tackling censorship threats internationally.
Through the fellowship, Index works with the winners – both during an intensive week in London and the rest of the awarding year – to provide longer term, structured support. The goal is to help winners maximise their impact, broaden their support and ensure they can continue to excel at fighting free expression threats on the ground.
Judges included human rights barrister Kirsty Brimelow QC; Bahraini campaigner Nabeel Rajab, a former Index award winner; pianist James Rhodes, whose own memoir was nearly banned last year; Nobel prize-winning author Wole Soyinka; tech entrepreneur Bindi Karia; and journalist Maria Teresa Ronderos, director of the Open Society Foundation’s independent journalism programme.
Ziyad Marar, global publishing director of Sage Publications, said: “Through working with Index for many years both as publisher of the magazine and sponsors of the awards ceremony, we at Sage are proud to support a truly outstanding organisation as they defend free expression around the world. Our warmest congratulations to everyone recognised tonight for their achievements and the inspiring example they set for us all.”
This is the 16th year of the Freedom of Expression Awards. Former winners include activist Malala Yousafzai, cartoonist Ali Ferzat, journalists Anna Politkovskaya and Fergal Keane, and human rights organisation Bahrain Center for Human Rights.
2016 Freedom of Expression Awards: The acceptance speeches
Bolo Bhi: “What’s important is the process, and that we keep at it”
Zaina Erhaim: “I want to give this award to the Syrians who are being terrorised”
GreatFire: “Technology has been used to censor online speech — and to circumvent this censorship”
Murad Subay: “I dedicate this award today to the unknown people who struggle to survive”
Smockey: “The people in Europe don’t know what the governments in Africa do.”
The opportunity to re-introduce Astrid Lindgren’s children’s literary figure Pippi Longstocking to a new Swedish generation in 2014 should have been a fairly innocuous affair. However, the decision to edit out parts of the programme, which originally aired in 1969, on anti-racist grounds caused a major furore. Two scenes in particular, Pippi’s reference to her father as King of the Negroes and secondly her slit-eyed impersonation of someone from China, were removed, provoking national and international debates about the rights and wrongs of the re-edit.
Critics rounded on the Swedish broadcaster SVT, accusing it of imposing adult PC values on a beloved fictional figure. But this situation is not unique to Sweden. The people who run television programming throughout western Europe are acting in the same way. The programme could be seen as simply part of work reflecting attitudes of a particular period. I fear there is a danger we lose the contextual understanding of the work and an understanding of the period by editing it in this way.
Mark Twain’s classic novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been at the centre of a similar debate in the United States, but the book was always intended to be controversial. Critics rounded on it when it was first published in 1885. The Committee of the Concord Public Library in Massachusetts, publicly declared the book “couched in the language of a rough, ignorant dialect” and that “all through its pages there is a systematic use of bad grammar and an employment of inelegant expressions”.
The enterprising publisher saw this as a “rattling tip-top puff” and used the library ban and …
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Join Index on Censorship for a taboo-busting evening at London’s best alternative venue – the Royal Vauxhall Tavern – to celebrate the launch of What’s the Taboo? – Index’s latest magazine featuring stories of the most controversial subjects from around the world.
With a panel that includes comedians Shazia Mirza and Grainne Maguire – we’ll be tackling tricky subjects – nudity, atheism, porn in China, mental health and racism could all be on the cards. If you want to explore and question who makes the rules when it comes to taboos – join us for what will be a dynamic evening exploring the unthinkable, the unmentionable and the unacceptable.
Following the panel event stick around for a special DJ set – Taboo Disco!
When: Wednesday 27 January 6:00pm – 11:00pm (6:00pm: Doors open & drinks; 6:30-8:00pm: What’s the Taboo?; 8:00-11pm: Taboo Disco DJ set)
Where: The Royal Vauxhall Tavern, 372 Kennington Lane, London SE11 5HY (map)
Tickets: Free but limited. Tickets must be booked in advance by emailing: [email protected]
More on the speakers:
Shazia Mirza is an award-winning comedian and columnist. TV Appearances include: Have I Got News For You, F*** Off, I’m a Hairy Woman, NBC’s Last Comic Standing and Richard and Judy. In 2008, she was listed in The Observer as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy and won the GG2 Young Achiever of the Year Award. Her current show The Kardashians Made Me Do It is on tour at the moment.
Grainne Maguire is a stand up comedian and comedy writer. She has appeared on Stewart Lee’s Alternative Comedy Experience, Radio 4’s Now Show, Stephen K Amos’ An Idiots Guide, Front Row and Women’s Hour. Last year her campaign to tweet Taoiseach Enda Kenny her menstrual cycle to protest against Ireland’s abortion laws went viral.
Kunle Olulode is director of black campaigning infrastructure charity Voice4Change England. He is also a film historian and exhibitor and part of the BFI’s African Odyssey programming team.
Max Wind-Cowie is a writer and political consultant. He previously ran the Progressive Conservatism project at the thinktank Demos and has written for newspapers including The Guardian, and the London Evening Standard.
Battle of Ideas 2015 The Birth of a Nation: more than racism on film? After Ferguson: policing and race in America Artistic expression: where should we draw the line? |
“Why censor the motion picture — the labouring man’s university? Fortunes are spent every year in our country teaching the truths of history, that we may learn from the mistakes of the past a better way for the present and future. The truths of history today are restricted to the limited few attending our colleges and universities; the motion picture can carry these truths to the entire world, without cost, while at the same time bringing diversion to the masses. As tolerance would then be compelled to give way before knowledge and the deadly monotomy of the cheerless existence of millions would be brightened by this new art, two of the chief causes making war possible would be removed.”
So wrote DW Griffiths in 1916 in the aftermath of his epic film Birth of a Nation. Fine words, loaded with twisted assumptions that rankle, irritate and anger anti-racists even a century on.
Birth of a Nation is no ordinary film. Inspired by Reverend Thomas Dixon’s novel and play The Clansman, it was engulfed in controversy: its central theme championed the post-civil war reformation of the Klu Klux Klan and blatantly suggested that American society only functioned effectively through the subjection of its black population. Worse still, its depiction of the defeated white slave-owning class as honourable victims of corrupt northern unionists and ‘carpet baggers’ contrasted against newly-liberated former slaves as feral, lustful, illiterates drunk with power and indulging in legally-sanctioned excess and wanton violence mainly to force white women into sexual relations.
Not surprisingly, on its release it was attacked by black journalists, political campaigners, trade unions, local government and filmmakers. The then newly-formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People lead a national campaign against it. In total, the film was banned in five states and 19 cities. Even as late as 1946, the Museum of Modern Art in New York refused to screen it.
Protests and audience reaction to the film, for and against, led to violent and, in some cases, fatal clashes. This continued right up to the 1950s when rumours of a talking re-make of the film swept Hollywood, reactivating the muted echo of labour union protests from earlier years.
In the 1980s, film historian Donald Bogle put forward the theses that film effectively shaped the images of black characters in Hollywood by consolidating five stereotypes: the Uncle Tom, the Comical Coon, the Tragic Mulatto, the Sexless Mammy and the over-sexed and violent Big Buck. These are ideas that would later be taken up by Robert Townsend in his comedic Hollywood Shuffle and more recently in Spike Lee’s polemic Bamboozled.
Nevertheless, Birth of a Nation was both a commercial and artistic success. Superbly directed by Griffiths, it altered the entire course of filmmaking, utilising innovative filming techniques such as close-ups, track shots and cross-cutting action sequences. The film initially made the relatively huge sum of $100,000 and earned over $18 million by 1931. It was only superseded by Gone With the Wind, another slavery epic that took its cue directly from Griffiths’ work. By the time of World War II, it had been seen by over 200 million people worldwide.
But that still doesn’t fully explain why the scope of Griffith’s work continues to trouble critics, filmmakers and fans alike. One of the best responses to this dilemma came from Richard Brody when he wrote in the New Yorker that, “the movie’s fabricated events shouldn’t lead any viewer to deny the historical facts of slavery and Reconstruction. But they also shouldn’t lead to a denial of the peculiar, disturbingly exalted beauty of Birth of a Nation, even in its depiction of immoral actions and its realisation of blatant propaganda.”
But the denial he seeks to avoid has already happened. The fact that the 100th anniversary of the film this year has been so studiously avoided by Hollywood and the Golden Globes Awards speaks volumes of its enduring power to shock, and the discomfort of both the film world and America more generally with confronting its troubled past when it comes to race and prejudice.
Attempting to understand and explore the social context in which racist ideas come from appears — in the 21st century — to have become a more difficult and exceptional task. Sadly, it seems that many would prefer airbrushing them away: deciding it’s better that people, in particular black people and those white masses ‘susceptible’ to racist ideas, avoid being exposed to the uncomfortable realities of the past.
However, we also have the examples of unheralded but important black filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux who didn’t back off from these challenges, but set about confronting the issues that agitated black and white audiences by telling alternative stories. In 1920, he created and produced Within Our Gates, a direct rebuttal to Griffiths’ propaganda. Micheaux’s emergence represents the first radical black voice in American film.
Kunle Olulode is director of Voice4Change England and film historian. He is speaking on Birth Of A Nation: more than racism on film? at the Battle of Ideas festival at the Barbican on 17 October. Index on Censorship’s director Jodie Ginsberg is also speaking on a session entitled Artistic expression: where should we draw the line?. Index are media partners of the festival.