Africa Roundtable Oct 2012: Laurance Price and Project Village Voices, a documentary series about poverty and dev in Tanzania

I am really looking forward to the upcoming roundtable next week on 5 October. My friend and officemate Laurance Price is a filmmaker and has been attending Africa Roundtable events in recent months. For October he has offered to speak about his very interesting documentary series about Tanzania called Project Village Voices. Details from Laurance below. 

As always, participation in the roundtable is possible in person at the venue (this time on Bainbridge Island at OfficeXpats, near Seattle) and remotely via the Internet. To register and to learn more about how the roundtable works, see http://www.africaroundtable.org - look forward to seeing you there! 

Laurance Price and Project Village Voices

I am a documentary filmmaker now based on Bainbridge Island and currently completing an anthropological adventure on rites of passage in a hunter-gatherer community in Tanzania.

A brief professional history: Early years in South Africa growing up during the last decades of Apartheid, film studies in Israel at Tel Aviv University, established the International Student Film Festival which recently had it's 14th biannual celebration, set up Real2Reel Films in Tanzania 12 years ago which is now a leading production house in East Africa. After an hiatus of 3 years as house dad, I am now starting up Legacy Works, a company that makes personal family legacy documentaries and ethical/spiritual wills.

The project that I would like to share with you is "Village Voices", a unique documentary series commissioned by UKAID to learn more about poverty in rural Tanzania and the impact of development policies on change.

In the early 2000's a number of donors moved away from supporting individual development projects and agreed to put their financial aid into direct budget support. Tanzania was among the first developing countries to be entrusted with this new international aid strategy and 'Village Voices' was one of the tools used to understand the impact.

I spent 6 years visiting 5 remote communities, each of a different ethnicity and livelihood, watching and listening as they struggled to break out of their subsistence entrapment. The 5 annual films tell the ongoing stories of particular families in each community and the final film seeks to make sense of it all. 

Website: http://www.projectvillagevoices.org