Ec(h)o is the convergence of past and future, here and there, us and them. The play on the words "eco", from the greek "Oikos" (home), and "echo", as sound, intends to communicate the sense that there are lessons to be drawn from those who came to the world before us. In "Ec(h)o", we want to understand Sustainability (environmental, social, and economic) in the eyes of an aging population. Because "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".
National
Portugal
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It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
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As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): Reboot Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Laura Last name of representative: Pereira Gender: Female Nationality: Portugal Function: Vice-president of the Board Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Rua Ferreira Borges n⁰111 R/C Dr Town: Campo de Ourique Postal code: 1350-128 Country: Portugal Direct Tel:+351 913 895 065 E-mail:laura.pereira@project-reboot.pt Website:https://project-reboot.pt/
"Ec(h)o" (in Portuguese, “Eco”) is a documentary exploring the role of an aging population in Portugal and in the world.
The story is divided into 3 acts:
I - Ageing: a demographic science view of the population; the inversion of the population pyramid that we observe in developed countries is bringing new socioeconomic challenges. Namely, we want to invite experts to weigh in on the future of Social Security and retirement policies.
II - Sensing: how is this reflected in how the elderly are experiencing aging? What is it like to grow old in Portugal, and in today’s World? We will interview real people, in their homes, to learn about exclusion, difficulties in access to services, poverty, loneliness.
III - Teaching: can we learn from old ways? What are the main arguments for the social inclusion of this population? How can the elderly become an active part of the solution for today’s challenges? Here, we refer back to “Eco”, as we ponder old habits and how to bring them back to tackle environmental sustainability.
The production of the documentary will be based on interviews with stakeholders and “in-the-wild”, spontaneous interactions. We plan to visit different regions of Portugal (urban and rural areas), to increase the visibility of local challenges and raise testaments of different life experiences and ideologies.
The documentary will culminate with an in-person premiere event, where the stakeholders will be asked to intervene and help with planning. “Ec(h)o” is the ultimate participatory design project on creative arts, communication, and sustainability, where the subjects are not just captured in film but are instead an active part of the project in its integrity.
The documentary will be publicly released and made available to all, so it can be used as an educational tool for every sphere within sustainability.
Inclusion
Sustainability
Co-design
Circularity
Awareness
This project is all-encompassing when it comes to sustainability, addressing multiple axes of this concept: social (exclusion, quality of aging, loneliness and depression); economic (how do demographic trends and current environmental and social challenges reflect in a country’s and the World’s economy?) and environmental, with this being the culmination of the narrative, as we detail below.
We intend to highlight the need for inter-generational coordination: we all need to come together in order to find viable and effective solutions for climate change. Through the sharing of ancient practices and life experiences - simpler and more sustainable than the ones we have embraced in recent decades -, we want to highlight how we can learn true circularity, noting the fact that "the new way" is actually "the old way.”
We want to argue for giving everyone - from the youngest to the eldest - a seat at the table, an active role in building a future for all. We aim to do this through the co-design of the documentary, the premiere event, and future communication. The subjects of the film piece will be part of the creative and narrative process, as well as provide important inputs for the premiere event, which aims to bridge the gap between generations and promote a sense of belonging.
We want to paint a raw portrait of stories and real people. Act I will contextualize, Act II will captivate, Act III will motivate, in a call to action. We count on a team with extensive background and experience in documentary production - Reboot has previously released “Sustenance”, a documentary on food waste ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrdZHyaMcDc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrdZHyaMcDc)).
Our team will be immersed in different settings across the country, targeting diverse populations and realities. We want to leverage the urban/rural contrast in the quality of life during aging, to sensitize the general public on the need for locally-designed solutions. But, perhaps more importantly, our team’s philosophy on the production of creative pieces is sustained on the principles of loose preconceptions on storytelling. We let the images and the subjects guide our cameras and narration, in a true co-design of a communication piece.
The premiere event will be the culmination of this creative and collaborative process of design, the physical manifestation of the message. Relying on Reboot’s extensive experience with event organizing and curation, we will also count on the voices of the subjects of the documentary to plan a day that meets every stakeholder’s goals. The public release of the piece will ensure its long-term impacts, just as the documentary “Sustenance” has done, by being watched in schools, events and as the starting point of critical debates.
This is “Ec(h)o” - voices that shout and keep reaching new minds.
Inclusion is at the center of the entire project, from its initial conceptualization to its final product. Through this work, we aim at projecting a new societal model, one where aging does not mean exclusion, obsolescence, and muting. One where the oldest generations are valued and viewed as valuable, one where the youth and the elderly become an active part of change, through communication of old knowledge into new contextualized realities.
Documentaries are incredibly valuable tools for sparking discussions and action, with potential for long-term impact. The premiere event will also reinforce these goals, through the fostering of real-life connections and exchanges between generations - linking people to people, people to causes, people to utopias of inclusion that can be achieved through active participation in our society. Everyone deserves a seat at the table.
Through communication and education, we hope to inspire action. The public release of the documentary will ensure there are no barriers for watching. We will also make sure to appropriately caption the documentary for audiovisual impairments, as well as translate the captions to English.
This question can be answered by reinforcing previous answers. The project is designed to be co-designed. All the stakeholders will be featured - from the elderly, who are the main focus of the project and who will be given the chance for creative input - to policymakers, economists, members of governmental institutions, associations for social inclusion, etc. We want to raise awareness by mobilizing all the actors that can become a part of change.
We want to feature real people, real stories, of those that are often left silent. We want to enhance the feeling that older generations can teach and can learn, that collaboration is not only possible but also urgent, in order to tackle the most dangerous challenge Humanity has ever faced. True circularity existed once: how can we bring it into today? And why is it pertinent to do so? We will address these questions through our creative piece.
We would like to highlight the Finnish project “Activist Grannies”, founded by Anu Harkki, which proves that *everyone* can participate in the fight against climate change, and that there is so much to learn from inter-generational coordination.
The conceptualization of this project arises from extensive research from our strong technical team, which takes a scientific approach to data collection and verification. Nonetheless, we recognize our limited scope and thus wish to formulate the final narrative as the project moves forward, by reaching out to experts and stakeholders in Portugal (as the documentary aims to capture this specific context).
For Act I, we will reach out to researchers and other experts within the fields of social theory, demographic trends, economic development, and social security. Act II will see stories from retirees, older participants, whom we will seek in an organic form to collect a multitude of testimonies. We will also reach out to experts within the fields of mental health, housing, associations and NGOs that work to support this slice of the population, and other experts that we find relevant to back up the stories told by our “protagonists”. Act III will also feature these protagonists and their tales of lives lived well before the age of extreme consumerism. We seek to draw lessons from their stories, to highlight the wisdom in their voices, to reinforce the fact that they are just like us, the youth - we have always been just trying our best.
The documentary will be promoted through promoting debate. This is how we plan to achieve change and long-term impact. By engaging experts and policymakers in the making of the documentary, but also in the discussions that will be had during and after its premiere. We want meaningful impact and plan to have a solid outline of how to measure change after the premiere. We will monitor visualizations, “satellite events” and other variables that can be used as a proxy for the impact of the documentary and the “Ec(h)o” project as a whole.
This project is all-encompassing and provides a convergence point for a multitude of disciplines. The fields of demography, sociology, and psychology will contribute with knowledge that allows us to contextualize the need to address the topic of exclusion of the aging population from the stage of active decision-making. Economic and investment fields will also address where these trends are going to lead to a breaking point, which brings strength to the argument of inclusion for more than just “social good” - we are now “talking about money”, arguably one of the most effective arguments for engaging people (namely, the “lukewarm” or “unbothered”) in worthy causes. Finally, we address how the aging population can actually play a role in the fight against the climate crisis, through inherited values that reflect true circularity and sustainability, which will borrow from knowledge of earth sciences and other disciplines that attempt to bring solutions to the table.
No other piece has addressed the Portuguese reality in such a holistic approach. Our broad thematic focus will represent different arguments that can be used to arrive at the same conclusion - it is important to include *all*, young or old, in the fight for our future. Through this process, we create a relevant, long-lasting communicative tool that can be shared freely to promote debate and critical thinking, as well as used as a leverage for seeking local solutions. Awareness and belonging are the keywords.
Further, we aim to borrow from principles of participatory design (collaborative design, or co-design) in the development of the creative piece, as well as for the premiere event, which is yet missing from a lot of artistic pursuits - the subject of the art becomes an integral part of the production of the art, providing valuable inputs and enabling a more pertinent final product.
Reboot has a young voice in all its events, with prior experience in the production of a documentary and its premiere event (see photos attached to submission, which are all from past events). We think differently, joining out-of-the-box approaches with a creative and motivated team to achieve awareness and change that extends well beyond the duration of our events and workshops.
Analogously to what we achieved with the documentary “Sustenance”, making a creative piece free and available promotes awareness and knowledge acquisition. This documentary has been a part of 5+ different events, where it was used as a prelude or postlude to panel discussions, workshops, debates, and other interactions. Additionally, it has been shown in schools and youth organizations. We continue to promote discussions through this documentary, with events planned for 2023.
For “Ec(h)o”, we want to take the best practices acquired through this promotion and reach an even larger audience, while still keeping it free and publicly available. The documentary *is* the tool that can be easily shared and used for education. Just like we did with “Sustenance”, we want to share our lessons about the development and production of the piece. Namely, we want to document and share insights from the co-design aspect of this project, hoping to let the community build an understanding that, sometimes, we don’t need to give voice to underrepresented populations and topics - we just need to help RAISE their voices.
This has been partially answered above. We will address the production of this documentary through “free-flowing narratives”. First, we have conducted extensive literature reviews, in order to build a planning draft for what we want “Ec(h)o” to become. However, as we talk to experts, stakeholders, “protagonists” (elderly) and through spontaneous interactions while filming, we will steer the narrative and interviews to the most relevant topics, accounting for the input of these participants, in order to ensure that it is them who have a final say on the stories that are told. We will borrow from collaborative design to achieve real impact. We will also iterate on previous methodologies used for “Sustenance”.
Planning an researching: 2 months (aligning interviews)
Filming and interviewing: 2-3 months
Editing (script and image): 4-5 months (account for feedback)
Planning of premiere event and promotion of documentary: 6 months, 4-5 of which should overlap with editing
Follow-up and monitoring of outcomes: at least for 12 months after premiere
The project will be a portrait of the Portuguese context but, more importantly, we will attempt to capture different perspectives within the country - e.g., aging in a rural vs urban environment comes with a very different set of challenges and experiences, and we want to capture that diversity. The bigger picture is painted exactly by displaying how broad the spectrum of aging, social, economic, and environmental challenges can be. This will ultimately be the best argument for the need for local solutions and active participation of all. We aim to make progress in the fields of inclusion, healthy aging, social behavior, active participation and civility.
The challenges that come with the inversion of the demographic pyramid, and the need for inter-generational cooperation against climate change and for social inclusion are, however, not just contained within Portugal. Thus, we believe that this piece has a global message and the potential for a global impact.
While this initiative is in its infant state, our best argument for progress is “Sustenance”. This documentary and its premiere event emerged from a budget of 15.000€ of public funding (subgranting #GoEAThical – “*Our Food. Our Future.”)*, which was in large part used for the purchasing of filming material (which will now not be necessary for “Ec(h)o”). By receiving public funding and in line with our values, we also kept full transparency in expenses and justification for those expenses. We were able to create a short film on food waste, with a premiere event that deserved multiple complimentary reviews, as well as a multitude of satellite events that kept (and keep) the conversation going. For “Ec(h)o”, we will take the best practices from this experience, streamline the process, and achieve a truly remarkable, impactful piece.
This project addresses sustainable development in a multi-disciplinary, multi-angle way, by expanding the concept of sustainability to include social and economic sustainability, a concept of which a large portion of the population is not yet aware of. We contribute to the development of new competencies as we transmit lessons and learn, namely through the collaborative design planned for this project. All four competence groups - embodying sustainability values, embracing complexity in sustainability, acting for sustainability and envisioning sustainable futures - are going to be addressed in the piece, as was described above. Perhaps more importantly, “learning at all ages” will be achieved through the premiere event, where multiple generations will come together to debate, discuss, entertain and get entertained. Communicating, connecting, belonging.
