Video Is That Tool

The Sundance Film Festivalkicks off next week, and this year's line-up includes a long list of social issue documentaries. Among these enlightening projects is a terrific film called The Reckoning, directed by Pamela Yates, which chronicles the recent efforts of the International Criminal Court, which was founded in 2002 to investigate and prosecute crimes against humanity. The Court's prosecutor is Luis Moreno Ocampo, and in writing about the film for Sundance's Daily Insider, I had a chance to talk to him briefly. The conversation was intriguing, and I was frankly surprised by his enthusiasm for video. Much of the investigative work done by the Court is taped for use as evidence, and the trials are taped and streamed online. More than that, however, Moreno Ocampo seems to understand a very important fact: how we experience events visually contributes to how we understand them, and how we experience events visually these days is not necessarily in a theater or on TV. "One in five people in the world has a cell phone that can be connected to the Internet with images," he explained, "so the judicial system we have today, which was born before TV and the Internet, which was born in the age of the telegraph, has to adjust." He went on: "Basically as a prosecutor, I have to serve a community, and as a global prosecutor, I need to serve a global community, and I need a global tool to do that - video is that tool."