Activist Media Lab

Date: 13th November 2022

Time: 10AM-5pm  

Location: Artspace, Creative Hub, Wexford town

Cost: This workshop is Free – Please register to attend 

Contact email: hello@douglassinwexford.com

Website: douglassinwexford.com

Screen Wexford are excited to work with the team at The Frederick Douglass Civil Rights Festival Wexford to support the Activist Media Lab. To all budding film journalists/activists, this one-day workshop will help you learn to structure your script, shoot your scene, shape your edit and champion your cause with the smartphone in your pocket and in the words of Frederick Douglass ‘Agitate, Agitate, Agitate’

The Frederick Douglass Civil Rights Festival Wexford are running a Activist Media Lab to give a platform to Wexford’s activists. 

We want to help write and produce a short film and think about those people who are marginalised and need their civil rights to be recognised.

Over the course of the one-day workshop, we will create, write and perform a collective film that will be shown at The Frederick Douglass Civil Rights Festival Wexford. This will involve scripting and delivering multiple pieces to the camera related to areas that you are passionate.

This workshop will be supported by Screen Wexford and run by Wexford filmmaker Therese Dalton who facilitates a range of video-based educational training including the Wexford Youth Film programme. Therese will walk participants through the fundamentals of filmmaking and the editing process to create engaging short films. 

All the footage created on the day will be then edited and presented at the 2022 The Frederick Douglass Civil Rights Festival Wexford on the 25th November  7-9pm in the Wexford Arts Centre.

Values 

The Frederick Douglass Civil Rights Festival Wexford values are: 

• To be rooted in the community, giving opportunity to local diversity, activists and artists.
• To include national and international artists and speakers to develop local awareness and links.
• To highlight contemporary civil rights issues and discrimination in Ireland. 

We are seeking young creative activists who wish to be a part of this journey and use their voice to speak about issues that are important to them.

Background info about Frederick Douglass

Runaway slave and American campaigner against slavery, Frederick Douglass visited the Assembly Rooms (now the Wexford Arts Centre) in October 1845 and spoke for 2 nights. The people who heard him were excited by his articulate oratory and the passion he had for his cause. 

Douglass was just 27 when he came to Ireland for just 4 months – he met Daniel O’Connell on his arrival in Dublin and was invited to speak at the end of one of his events. Both men were seriously impressed with each other and became friends for life. Douglass was given the nickname ‘The Black O’Connell’ Douglass said that O’Connell had changed him from a single issue campaigner to one who advocated for civil rights for everyone everywhere. He was ahead of his time in supporting advocates for women’s rights. He only visited Ireland again once many years later but was still shocked by the poverty. 

He wrote prolifically and founded a newspaper. He was an adviser to Abraham Lincoln and saw the abolition of slavery in 1865. He married twice – his second wife was white. While he was in Ireland Quakers in the UK purchased his freedom as he had arrived with a bounty on his head. Until his death in 1887 he was politically active and his last advice to a young activist was Agitate, agitate, agitate.