Diary of a participatory advocacy film project: transforming communication initiatives into living campaigns Emilie Flower and Brigid McConville In August 2007, the government of Tanzania made a commitment to doubling the number of training places for skilled midwives, following a five-year campaign by the White Ribbon Alli- ance for Safe Motherhood in Tanzania (WRATZ), which culminated in the first television screening of a participatory film, ‘Play Your Part’. With contributions from a range of health professionals, communities, a pop singer, and the Minister of Health, the message was that everyone at every level has a part to play in saving mothers’ lives. WRATZ was suc- cessful because it was able to promote its message in a way that provides a model for advocacy, combining the reactive creativity of journalism and the methodological rigour of participatory video to bring about a tangible impact. KEY WORDS: Civil Society; Gender and Diversity; Governance and Public Policy; Rights; Social Sector; Sub-Saharan Africa Introduction In June 2005 my family and I went to the Glastonbury Festival, 1 where I was hoping to work on a film that I was making. Through its press officer, I was introduced to Brigid McConville, who had recently joined the Board of the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood. She had heard of the participatory video (PV) method used by Insight, an organisation with which I had been working for six years, and asked if I could collaborate on a PV project for the White Ribbon Alliance (WRA) at the festival. A few days later, we settled down in a ‘yurt’, conducting a circular name game about mother- ing. As one woman interviewed her daughter, she began to cry: given the platform to perform, her quiet teenage daughter openly spoke about her pride in and love for her mother. The ability of the PV technique to capture these intimate feelings in a respectful filming environment par- ticularly appealed to Brigid. A journalist and writer for more than 20 years, she had turned to film making as a way of capturing women’s stories. Her first film, made in 2004, ‘My Sister, My Self’, contained the stories of women who had lost someone during childbirth: a sister, a mother, ISSN 0961-4524 Print/ISSN 1364-9213 Online 070933-5 # 2009 Oxfam GB 933 Routledge Publishing DOI: 10.1080/09614520903122428 Development in Practice, Volume 19, Number 7, September 2009