Five days in May: You’ll get quality time
with foreign relations in the pubTV family
Originally published in Current, Dec. 18, 2006
By Bill Gilcher
Going to INPUT is like going to a bazaar where the best of public television is freely available and a thousand people are madly discussing the things that bring us together—or separate us—as television professionals in our very different countries back home.
Not a festival, not a market, with no awards given, other than the honor of having your program there, INPUT is a quirky annual event that has brought together creative public TV people for 30 years. Yet it has never established a permanent bureaucracy or even a physical mailing address, though nowadays we have virtual addresses — www.input-tv.org and next year’s annual conference site, www.input2007.org.
INPUT (the name comes from INternational PUblic Television) is a strange kind of family: There are a host of faces I see only at this annual gathering of people dedicated to public media. We bicker occasionally, as any family does, but by and large the experience of watching and discussing programs with them is so supportive and thought-provoking that I’ve made it a priority to find my way to almost every INPUT since I first discovered the conference when I worked for the National Endowment for the Humanities’ media program in the mid-’80s. You come away refreshed, with your mind opened, recalling why creativity and the mission of public television are so vital in the first place.
Every year’s INPUT experience is new because each is organized by a different broadcast organization, though the schedule and selection process follow models developed since the conference began in 1978. Fortunately for Americans, it’s largely conducted in English. The screening has been held most often in North America and Europe, but in more recent years, INPUT’s global conversation has been strengthened through conferences in South Africa (2000 and 2008) and Taiwan (2006).
For five days in May, INPUT is packed with 80 hours of screenings, morning and afternoon, plus special topic discussions in the evenings. As provocative or beautiful or fascinating as the programs are, however, the extraordinary part of the conference is the discussions that take place around them. (Fortunately, the host broadcaster interrupts the concentrated schedule with a midweek party, attempting to outdo the previous year’s host with local food, drink and entertainment. The standards set by Taiwan’s public TV network last May won’t be easy for Swiss Television to match in Lugano next June.)
The experience may be most intense for the makers of the 80 to 90 programs screened at INPUT, including the producers of five to ten U.S. titles a year, but others will find INPUT well worth the trip.
Station managers and executive producers, for instance, can recognize and discuss the real issues they face in the complicated, sometimes contentious production and scheduling process. Seeing how a European or Asian broadcaster deals with economic, political, content or stylistic constraints gives us a fresh perspective on our problems — and perhaps even some new ideas for solving them. For instance, after the furor over Danish publication of the infamous cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, INPUT devoted a special session to the event’s implications for public television. Another session dealt with how high-definition affects programming and content. Naturally, the evolving relationship between broadcasting and the Internet continues to generate debate, creativity and novel solutions; INPUT is an excellent forum for trading viewpoints on policy issues of all kinds.
For producers, INPUT is quite simply an inspiration. It gives you a chance to see programs you’d never hear about otherwise and learn about production decisions directly from their makers. How else would you even know about Hessed (Grace), a strikingly intimate Israeli feature documentary about hospice care? Or Vitamin, a Korean instructional program so entertaining that it was moved to primetime? Or a charming short documentary by a young woman from Catalonia about her grandfather learning how to make videos? And if you find out too late about the great program you missed yesterday, you can still catch it in an on-demand screening room.
It’s hard not to be inspired by some of these programs and people. Talking with an enthusiastic young Indian broadcaster about her station’s emphasis on using public media to examine social problems serves as a good reminder of an important traditional mission of public broadcasting.
Hearing delegates from Taiwan, Korea and the United States respond to They Chose China, a Canadian documentary about American soldiers who chose to stay in China at the end of the Korean War, was a startling experience for someone like me who had never been to Asia before last year’s INPUT. In this case, the subject itself was compelling enough to garner my attention. Then I was intrigued by the program’s use of archival footage from sources I didn’t know existed. INPUT added another layer: In the discussion, you could hear the views of people behind the film as well as those of diverse TV professionals from other cultures and broadcast systems. What a thought-provoking treat!
Attending INPUT repeatedly opens your eyes to the unexpected—to new people, to programs by younger producers as well as seasoned professionals.
Some broadcasters, notably those from Canada and Scandinavia, bring sizeable delegations to INPUT as a first-rate training seminar for their staffs, both junior and senior. They follow up with discussions about how it all applies to what they’re doing at home. For Americans who can’t make it to a screening overseas, stations or regional groups can work with INPUT’s U.S. secretariat at South Carolina ETV to create their own “Best of INPUT” screenings closer to home, using DVDs of notable INPUT programs.
Last month I got a partial preview of INPUT 2007 as one of an eclectic group of a dozen evaluators who spent three days in South Carolina watching 130 programs and winnowing them down to fit the U.S. quota of 17 submissions. In February, an international selection group made up of next year’s “shop stewards” (session moderators), will meet in Berlin to winnow the films down to those that will be shown in Lugano.
The U.S. pre-selection included a huge variety: the wonderful short drama “American Made”; big-budget documentaries like “The Boy in the Bubble,” which aired on American Experience; a report by a Montana PBS station (KUFM, Missoula) that dared to take on a scandal brewing in state politics and education; and Beyond Beats and Rhymes, a provocative program about masculinity in hip-hop culture with enough rough language that it may not air before 10 p.m. in some U.S. cities.
There were moments when the subject matter blew us away, but to choose the U.S. submissions, we came back to the universal INPUT issues. How was the program made? Why was it made? Why did it take this particular form? Where was it placed in the television schedule? What’s the public television issue that can be discussed around this program? Will it catalyze a hearty discussion about public television and its variety of missions around the world?
I have been asked if I’m ever uncomfortable as an American delegate or shop steward at INPUT, venturing into a world where my country’s reputation is suffering. I find that the people at INPUT are curious and genuinely committed to international communication through the mission of public broadcasting. Delegates from other countries want to know what we think and are generally very interested in hearing our perspectives.
We have time to clarify the differences from country to country. For instance, given U.S. public television’s particular mandate and history in our highly commercial media landscape, public television here has developed remarkable, perhaps unmatched strength in educational and documentary production. This is not the case for broadcasters in countries where “television” and “public television” are the same thing.
Our priorities and our assumptions about public television may be different. But when we discuss the interests of our audiences and the mandate to inform them about the realities and challenges facing our societies, we quickly find common ground.
For anyone with the slightest bit of curiosity, INPUT can change your life in five days.
Bill Gilcher splits his time between working on media projects for the Goethe-Institut/ German Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., and his independent projects. He can be reached at wgilcher@washington.goethe.org. For a third year he’ll help assemble a Best of INPUT screening series for public broadcasters in the Washington area (Feb. 6-10 ).
INPUT 2007 will be held May 6-12 in Lugano, Switzerland. Conference registration costs only about $50. Information about special fares to Switzerland, reasonably priced lodgings and the details of registration are listed at www.input2007.org. CPB typically has offered a limited number of travel grants through the U.S. INPUT Secretariat based at South Carolina ETV. Contacts: Terry Pound and Amy Shumaker, SCETV, 803-737-3434.
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posted Jan. 3, 2007
Copyright 2006 by Current Publishing Committee