Pepinieres du Sahel

Pepinieres du Sahel (Tree Nurseries of the Sahel) from Barry Pousman on Vimeo.

Elle Travaille, Elle Vit!

Elle Travaille, Elle Vit! (She Works, She Lives!) from Barry Pousman on Vimeo.

Upcoming Events:

"Elle Travaille, Elle Vit!" is having another screening; this time for a weekly documentary film series at the University of Georgia in Athens. The second film of the evening will be "The Iron Triangle - the Carlyle Group exposed". The event is being currated by Ash Sechler, a senior majoring in New Media at UGA. It will start at 8:00pm in the New Art School on campus.

Also, on Monday, October 20th, P.O.P. will officially be in New York. We are looking forward to getting our own domain name but until then, bare with us as we try to keep you abreast of all our company updates.

In Transition...

P.O.P. is going Stateside. We're moving production opperations to New York City this month and hopefully, it will go smoothly. Recently, we have had two major events: The Premier of "Elle Travaille, Elle Vit!" ("She Works, She Lives!") followed up by a question and answer session with the director at the American Club in Dakar for members of various international development organizations and schools. We had a second screening of the film at the U.S. Embassy in Dakar's screening room. Guests included the U.S. Embassador, various Senegalese government officials and ministers, as well as the national media.

We are also currently in talks with USAID as well as the Ministery of Education, the Ministery of Environment, and RTS - the national television station - about the distribution of both "Elle Travaille, Elle Vit!" and "Pepinieres du Sahel" ("Tree Nurseries of the Sahel"). Both films are accompanied by packets of supplemental materials for educators to be used in conjunction with the films.

We will keep you informed of any updates and feel free to contact us with questions, concerns, or ideas for future projects.

The First Installment

To our readers and fans, this is the first of many installments focusing on visual culture and its effects and impacts on populations in the developing world. While I was in the Peace Corps in Senegal, West Africa in 2006 to 2008, I noticed that televisions were quickly becoming the wave of the future even in villages without electricity (the televisions are powered by rechargeable car batteries and/or small generators). Every night, billions of people in the developing world turn on their TVs and watch the one or two national channels available with programing ranging from sports and entertainment to news and public awareness bulletins. This is truly a new generation. A few years ago, to think that subsistence farmers miles off the grid would regularly watch and discuss TV shows would have been far fetched. Now however, we see that the developing world does have their foot in the door with digital media from Internet cafes where teenagers pay per hour to watch YouTube videos, to local NGOs providing "Moto-Movie Nights" where televisions and batteries are brought out on motorcycles to remote communities to screen relevant documentaries and informational videos. This is an incredible time for media artists from around the world to be able to help and contribute in every sector of development.

"Phenomenal progress in new communication techniques - the digitization of images, sound and data, the digital compression of data and the growing power of electronic components - is part of the technological upsurge that is set to overturn completely the existing conditions under which information and knowledge are produced and disseminated, according to the World Communication Report"
- The media and the challenge of the new technologies, authored by Professor Lotfi Maherzi of Algeria and published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).