“African Stories” – DW Akademie

The Deutsche Welle Akademie is Germany’s biggest media development organization. Sporadically I work as a camera and editing trainer for their TV-journalism project “African Stories“. With local teams in Guinea, Mali, DR Congo, Senegal, Ghana and Tunisia, I have instructed workshops and supervised co-productions. Apart from giving my best to provide meaningful advice to participants, I have documented the co-productions in photos.

Giving these workshops has been a very enriching experience – as has also the confrontation with TV conventions, of which I am very critical. This makes the project especially interesting for me, as there is a big demand locally to learn international standards and rules, something I don’t actually believe exists as such. I wrote my MA thesis about this dilemma, which arises, as I see it, from the discrepancy between deconstructionist thinking, its practical limitations and possiblities to work despite them.