Dawn sent me the ABC News video about the Unification Church and her brother’s blessing ceremony. One of the videos is called Rare Access to the Secretive Religion of Unificationists and Arranged Weddings, which I immediately find very strange as I happen to know that on one hand the religion’s members are easy ‘access’, and on the other hand the religion is in no way ‘secretive’, if only not very well known. This annoys me as I can already see the ways in which ABC News is manipulating people into perceiving the religion negatively before they even know anything about it as well as alienating people who don’t belong to it from it.
The language use in the videos is exactly what I’ve wanted to avoid and get away from as I’m trying to portray the normal and human side of the religion. I hope I can do this and counteract some of the ways the media portrays it.
The Second video is actually about Dawn’s brother himself and the woman he was matched with in the run up to the blessing ceremony.
The Unification movement 
cool to see that you are engaging with the subjects in this way, i am a fan of participatory cinema, i think the only way i can properly articulate this is through a favourite quote about being involving the subject with the project…
“by revealing their role, filmmakers enhance the value of the material as evidence. By entering actively into the world of their subjects, they can provoke a greater flow of information about them. By giving them access to the film they make possible the corrections, additions and illuminations that only the subjects’ response to the material can elicit” (MacDougall, 1998; 134).