ABSTRACT

Precedents In 1966 Sol Worth and John Adair began a project of collaborative fi lmmaking with Navajo Indians in the southwestern US (Worth and Adair 1972). That same year in a school in the Appalachian Mountains of the US, graduate teacher Eliot Wigginton began a documentary magazine called Foxfi re working with Grade 9 and 10 students from his struggling English class, asking his students to research and document their community and its traditions (Wigginton 1972). In 1967 the Canadian National Film Board (NFB) established the Challenge for Change program, an activist documentary fi lm project, which aimed to address poverty and other social justice issues through participatory fi lmmaking with marginalised communities across Canada (Waugh, Baker, and Winton 2010). Within a few short years of these three projects commencing, collaborative documentary approaches using increasingly accessible recording technologies had spread across North America and beyond.