INDY MEDIA Activists report straight from the ramparts BY ALEX PROVAN

When the streets of Buenos Aires were filled with protesters for a significant portion of last year, the international media conglomerates didn’t pay much attention. When they did, "they were only reporting the violence, the perspective of the police," says Andrés Ingoglia, an Argentine who has since relocated to Providence.

In the wake of Argentina’s economic collapse, Ingoglia, 29, lost his job and moved to New York. Once there, he went to the Independent Media Center and met Raphael Lyon, a 27-year old Brown University graduate who was active in the fight to save Providence’s historic Eagle Square mills. The two decided to make Eye of the Storm: The Crisis in Argentina and the Role of Independent Media at the Center of a Revolution, a documentary about the relationship between new methods of journalism and the new social movements in Argentina.

The Independent Media Center, called Indymedia for short, came into existence to provide comprehensive coverage of the 1999 protests in Seattle, the birthplace of today’s global democracy movement. Indymedia has since burgeoned into a global — if mostly virtual — network of independent journalists, activists, organizers, and readers, without a traditional center. Proponents call Indymedia the epitome of democracy — no editors, no filters, no political affiliations, no corporate funding. Through Web sites organized by locality, it attempts to unify journalists, activists, social movements, and readers while maintaining, in Lyon’s words, a base in "identity, time, and location."

Eye of the Storm explores communication as a critical internal and external tool for social movements. The film focuses on a chaotic period of Argentine history, marked by the popular uprisings of December 2001, which prompted the resignation of President Fernando de la Rúa. The country then had five presidents in two weeks, defaulted on most of its $141 billion debt, froze bank accounts, saw its currency collapse, and witnessed a prolonged period of mass protest and unrest.

Argentina’s Indymedia (www.argentina.indymedia.org) emerged from this disorder as a formidable democratic alternative to old-guard newspapers and the propagandistic organs of the leftist Peronist party, allowing anyone with access to a computer to report what they were seeing in the streets. For Lyon, this is the shared goal of the documentary and Indymedia — to "empower people on both continents toward the possibilities of reclaiming media for democratic ends."

Lyon and Ingoglia are currently working on the production phase of the documentary. Besides painting houses two days a week, they’ve funded the film and two trips to Argentina by showing a 14-minute trailer and other underground Argentine documentaries at film festivals, universities, and other locations around the US in the recent months. "We’re basically unfundable," Lyon says. "The work is too political to be funded by arts grants. If there are grants out there for people to do political work, they don’t fund films."

But the absence of organized funding also frees the two from artistic and political constraints, keeping them closer to the structure and spirit of Indymedia itself, and forcing them to take their show on the road to build interest. In many ways, this is just what the documentary is all about.