michael allder is an nfb producer and is one of the organizers of Best of INPUT 96 which will be held, initially, in Toronto in November.

* * *

guadalahara, mexico: The opening reception set the style at this year’s input. About 1,125 delegates from 45 countries enjoyed a mariachi band, a Jaliscan folk ensemble and the ever-present sense of tequila before getting down to business at this 19th assembly of public television’s program-makers.

Many came from Mexico and other Central and Latin American countries, but on the screen perhaps the most dramatic presence was an unexpected one – the former ussr.

Many of the films and the programs presented would in past decades likely never have been made, and certainly not shown on Russian tv.

Experimentum Crucis, a controversial expose of the Russian juvenile prison system, began as amateur footage by the prison psychiatrist and documents the ritualized sadism of the staff and the casual but relentless brutality and abuse of the inmates.

It was a hard film to watch, apparently especially for the Soviet authorities who, even in these post-Glasnost days, promptly placed the psychiatrist under arrest and revoked his licence to practise. The film, however, was shown on national tv.

Why Are You Alive?

Among other Russian work at the conference was Why Are You Alive, the extraordinary story of three million Russian pows who returned from captivity in wwii concentration camps only to be sentenced to further terms of imprisonment in Siberia, and The Last Parade, an ironic study of a group of war veterans attending a May Day parade.

Other films that clearly evidenced the power and influence of television as a platform for social and political comment included The Dying Rooms, an investigative account of allegations of state-empowered genocide in contemporary China, and Freak Out, a semi-dramatized documentary that ridicules contemporary attitudes towards the disfigured and the disabled.

Some program-makers played fast and loose with traditional documentary and current affairs storytelling. The Dutch program Thirty Minutes in the Wrong Body featured such satirical pieces as a heroin addict being given a free fix at a government clinic on the condition that he write and perform his own poetry. A half-hour French current affairs program, Brut, consisted only of segments of unedited tape without commentary. Each slice of life from somewhere around the world captured a politically loaded and socially provocative moment. There was no hand-holding here; you got out of it what you read into it.

Life Somewhere Else

Among the more cinematic entries, the Brazilian short film Life Somewhere Else, the story of a friendship of an artist and a woman serving a lengthy jail sentence, said little but spoke much. The feature-length film Nico Icon, was as self-consciously hip as its central character, Christa Paffgen, alias Nico, the enigmatic ‘Andy Warhol’ actress, drug addict and singer with Velvet Underground.

INPUT 96 was also very much the year of the unquiet Canadian. Films like Ric Beinstock’s Ms. Conceptions, Jacques Holender’s Time Is On My Side, Anna Vanderwee’s The Dead Are Alive and Chris Mullington’s Vasectomy played to big crowds. (Vasectomy also had the distinction of being the second most requested for on-demand screenings at the conference.)

Canadian delegates tended to be amongst the first and last to speak at screening discussions, and, at the Wednesday night salsa party, to hit the dance floor.

And Canadians, in the genial form of cbcers Norm Bolen and Cynthia Reyes, are the president and secretary general of this public broadcasting United Nations.

Finally, a snapshot of INPUT 96: the image of the Russian psychiatrist, Hi-8 in hand, videotaping much of the week’s events, from mariachi night to the sessions to the closing ceremonies at the French consulate (heralding next year’s input in Nantes, France). A convert to filmmaking and to the true potential of television, not pap or propaganda. A reminder too of the fragility of public-minded broadcasting around the world, beleaguered as much by commercialism as by oppressionbut still producing.