[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 19, 12:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City]

The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court is the flagship film for a three-year Audience Engagement Campaign intended to get people around the world involved in international justice. While I was filming over two years across four continents in six languages, media possibilities exploded. So from the very beginning producer Paco de Onís, editor Peter Kinoy and I were thinking about how to create educational modules for the Web and adapt digital technologies for human-rights work.

The result is that we and our Skylight Pictures Audience Engagement Team will launch IJCentral.org (International Justice Central), a global social network that will drive an alternative distribution and advocacy model for The Reckoning at Sundance ’09 Film Festival. Our challenge is to ensure The Reckoning film will inspire and energize audiences to follow through to IJCentral.org, building a global grassroots movement in support of an effective international justice system that will hold perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide accountable, no matter how powerful they may be.

IJCentral.org will implement a multiplatform citizen-engagement strategy using online mapping technology at its core to visualize the global social network. It will aggregate blogs, videos, SMS text messaging, media modules created from The Reckoning footage, Facebook and MySpace groups, e-mail listserve groups, news feeds and photo feeds, taking advantage of all the social bookmarking applications available online. Making use of mobile phones, the world’s most widely distributed communications platform, Twitter text messaging will be incorporated into the map, allowing activists, victims, educators, students and other members of the network to upload SMS text messages to the map, where a global conversation about justice will appear as geo-located pop-ups on the map. As it accumulates content from users, IJCentral.org will become an invaluable resource and database for human-rights advocates and activists around the world, and a powerful action tool.

IJCentral.org will drive traffic to the site through screenings and broadcasts of The Reckoning, as well as a range of strategic stakeholder partners with worldwide reach, including the Coalition for the ICC, an umbrella group for 2,500 NGOs (non-governmental organizations) around the world that are actively working to achieve universal ratification of the ICC. IJCentral.org will also be a place where educators and advocates can download the media modules and other materials, in multiple language versions, for use in their work.

The IJCentral.org audience-engagement campaign is a co-production of my company Skylight Pictures, Inc. and the media production unit of the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), a worldwide organization that assists countries pursuing accountability for past mass atrocity or human-rights abuse.