Hopefully you may watch it on cable, or PBS's POV (Point of View), or some satellite network channels like FSTV (Free Speech TV) or WorldLinkTV? Or if you are lucky you will wait a few years and purchase the video for $25-$50 through some distributor, if you are so inclined to buy videos. Or you might get really lucky and see it advertised at Blockbusters Video Stores. I sincerely doubt it. Or perhaps you will find it at an independent video rental store that features documentaries? If it's the latter, it will probably be a large city whose demographics include people who want to rent documentaries, a rare breed these days. Or, you may find it at your local library where you can take it out for free.

So, how do good quality and potent and politically effective documentaries get out to the public arena after they have saturated the more popular market, if in fact they have even gone through the traditional market routes?

At conferences I will see an excellent documentary being played in a small classroom sized room on a small TV with a VCR with perhaps a few diehards eager to see the film ... scheduled amidst a plethora of other workshops happening at the same time. Or at times, University and College campuses will get the rights to show an excellent documentary and show it on campus for free for one night.

What can be done? Is there a niche where this feeble and weak distribution system can be challenged and changed.

There are now communities throughout the country that are using video projectors (those very cool small boxes that can project a video or DVD onto a large screen, 8 by 12 feet) to show very cool documentaries and short features to audiences in all sorts of unusual places. Whether it's a bar, restaurant, top of an apartment building [check out rooftopfilms.com for a very cool presentation of wild and fresh and new independent films atop a 5-story apartment complex in Manhattan], a building wall being used as a screen at some side street, or a church basement, films and videos and DVDs can be shown to larger and larger audiences. Because of the revolutionary technology of the video projector and because of its price being lowered, it is now possible to create a traveling theater.

Pack the VCR, video projector, amplifier and speakers into a suitcase with wheels ... and away you go ... onward to the venue where gatherings can come and watch on a large screen some excellent educational and politically potent documentaries.

Locate the videos, DVDs or films. Buy them or rent them. Get permission from the director, producers or the distribution company. Show them at a favorite venue or move around to different cities or different venues in the same city. The possibilities are endless and you can make money for everyone involved. After you show them to the public, it is even possible to store them at a video store (with permission) and rent them out to even a larger audience, so there's more of a life to these excellent videos. So the education and passion and courage and artistic expression has a continuity to them ... so they live on! So dissenting viewpoints can live on... So awakening and political gutsiness live on!!

For example, my first encounter with a video projector and a very cool documentary on the Zapatistas happened in Seattle during the anti-WTO protests in November of 1999. After a long day at a conference sponsored by the very radical group of scholarly activists called the International Forum on Globalization (www.ifg.org), I was walking down the streets in Seattle. As I was sight-seeing (this was days before the cacophony/clash between protesters and the police) and browsing the numerous flyers posted on buildings, I came across a cool poster describing a film to be shown called "Zapatista." It was happening that night in a short time right near where I was walking.

I walked over a few blocks and to my amazement there was a crowd trying to get into a basement of what appeared to be sleazy bar. The line did not move. We waited and waited and talked and talked until the line started to move down the stairs. More than an hour later I found myself cramming into a dank and dark cellar with about 100+ more people eager to see the film.

A strange box emitting a blue light shining on a white cotton bed sheet taped precariously on the wall of the basement was what struck me initially. Suddenly the wall came to life with the beginnings of the film after a great introduction by one of the filmmakers who went to Chiapas in search of Commandante Marcos and the Zapatista rebellion. The dank dark cellar became a theater alive with passion, intellectual energy, courage and emotional potency. The film "Zapatista" was not only a hit for me and the rest of the tightly crammed audience but it started a whole new revolution in education, mobilization, activist campaigning and how to articulate one's cause to larger groups of people.

I bought the video from the director and promised that I would hold a screening in a small town called San Luis Obispo and would call them as soon as I got back. Three years later we are still showing radical films. I wrote an ebook (9,000 words) to tell you all about it, how to do it yourselves so other people throughout the country who don't yet know about this revolution can get turned onto it and begin extending the life of very cool and powerful documentaries. And simultaneously help support right livelihoods and getting the message out about the many causes that are inundating us daily.

Creating a traveling theater helps the directors, the producers, the film distributors, the video rental folks, the reviewers of documentaries and the people like ourselves, the new promoters of a new niche in the documentary industry. And of course the viewer who is eager to be educated about all sorts of subjects that the corporate cineplexes are not showing.

For a copy of the ebook called BECOMING THE MEDIA: SHOWING FILMS IN YOUR LOCAL COMMUNITY by Bob Banner with Mark Phillips, send $10.00 to HopeDance Media, POB 15609, San Luis Obispo, CA 93406 or go to http://www.hopedance.org/new/ebooks.html, and pay via PayPal. The above article is an Introduction to the ebook. Reprinted with permission. Bob Banner is publisher of HopeDance and can be seen with Mark Phillips showing vitally important documentaries in SLO county.