Last Saturday over 1300 attendees showed up for the 4th annual Grassroots Media Conference, sponsored by the Grassroots Media Coalition and Paper Tiger Television. Panels, presentations, installations and films covered topics as wide-ranging as the genocide in Darfur, the NYC ghost bike project, police brutality, and hip hop activism (and plenty of it)… all with the common goal of using media as a tool for social justice.

As part of the all-day film festival, NYC-based Glass Bead Collective presented their short “50 Shots and a Mule – Part 1″, a documentary that covers the December 16th protests of the Sean Bell shooting. Part 2 - not shown on Sat. but also available at the site - was filmed at the following march on Wall St. on December 22nd and is shot in part with 360-degree cam that gives a full view of the police surveillance of protestors. GBC documents creative and political dissent, and includes members from backgrounds in video art, film, theater, architecture, photography, music, mathematics, fine arts and philosophy.

Saturday is the 4th annual Grassroots Media Conference, a huge, day-long event organized by the NYC Grassroots Media Coalition. The New School University will host the event from 10am-7, and the conference will include speakers, workshops, film screenings and art exhibitions. This year’s theme is “Media Movements Beyond Borders”; the wide-ranging topics will have the common goal of creating social justice through better access to and representation in the media.

Look for workshops “The New York City Streets Renaissance: Reclaiming New York City’s streets from the automobile”; “DIY Animation Crash Course”; and “Grassroots Media and Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards Development.” Films include “50 Shots and a Mule,” a documentary on the protests that followed the Sean Bell shooting, and the state of protests in general, and “Land, Rain, and Fire: Report from Oaxaca.”

From the organization’s website:

Grassroots struggles for justice are usually rooted in their geographic locations. Yet—from police brutality on the streets of Queens to government repression in the plazas of Oaxaca; from homelessness and displacement in the Bronx to the rise of slums in Lagos; from hunger and poverty in East New York to famine in Kenya; from wiretapping and police surveillance in our communities and military occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan—there are apparent connections in the ways people all over the world negotiate and counter similar forms of oppression and injustice.

NYC Grassroots Media Conference
“Media and Movements Beyond Borders”
Saturday February 24th, 2007
New School University
65 Fifth Avenue (at 13th Street)