Dear Audrey Tang,
My name is Nuno Escudeiro and I am Portuguese independent documentary filmmaker, based in Italy and working internationally in Europe. I am writing to you as I am currently developing a new film project which working title is “Re:public”. In this project, we are, in a broad sense, searching for ways to bring people to work together and change their environments for the best, overcoming disempowerment and disillusion towards public and private initiatives that are not managing to come up with solutions to solve current problems in the communities. Our idea is to inspire for collective and individual participation from common citizens through initiatives taking place all over the world they can implement in their surroundings.
I am writing to you because I have been very moved and inspired by your practice and what you have worked, along with your office, to implement in Taiwan. I think it is a crucial story for my film that resonates with me and people worldwide.
I will try to explain the idea of the film better. On the first part of the film, we are mostly focusing on the idea of Commons, showing how commons are growing all over the world and how people are coming together in small communities to take over certain resources in ways that are ethical and in accordance to the values that we are searching to implement today: people-centric and working towards reverting climate change and socio-economic disparities. Here we talk about things like Collective housing, Solidarity agriculture, Platform Cooperativism.
In the second chapter, we start tackling another issue, on how the State is already a form of people coming together, but that unfortunately (and here I speak mostly for the European context, which is that I live in) has become less inviting for the participation of common citizens in ways other than voting. In the chapter, we go out searching for interesting projects that open the state and creatively create forms of delegating power and responsibility. I am contacting you because I find your work, that of the PDIS and the Digital Ministry, very inspiring and a beautiful pathway example to rethink our relationship to the State, through openness, transparency and a broader sense of mutual trust. I would love to have these projects in my film and to use them as sources of inspiration for audiences to reflect/implement/demand similar strategies from the governing bodies they belong to. I would like to work by following a project or initiative you are working on, which embodies what you are trying to implement, rather just having interviews on the topic in a more classic mediatic approach.
The film is still in an early phase of the process as we are currently developing and strengthening the idea of the film, solidifying the knowledge around the topics, while creating international partnerships to cooperate on the film. In this phase I want to understand better the way you work, and you implement your strategies.
As a first step, I would like to ask you for a way to connect with either you or someone in your team, with whom I could have a virtual meeting in order to discuss our eventual collaboration and to develop my knowledge of the concrete projects and strategies you are developing in your practice, initiating what I hope can be an inspiring partnership for both our work.
Best regards,
Nuno Escudeiro