Astra Taylor, one of our “25 New Faces” this year, passed on information about a new media activist and documentary organization, Lens on Lebanon, currently seeking donations and support.

From the group:

Lens on Lebanon is a grassroots documentary initiative formed in response to the devastating Israeli bombardment of 2006. As filmmakers, journalists, and activists from Lebanon, Europe, and North America, we are pooling our resources to deliver film and video equipment into communities in south Lebanon, and to bring out documentary evidence as well as photo narratives, and video diaries of daily life under siege. With its infrastructure destroyed, a burgeoning refugee crisis, and its towns and villages under continual bombardment, the south is becoming less accessible to journalists and – with U.N observers fleeing under Israeli fire in early August – increasingly isolated from the outside world. Lens on Lebanon is a non-partisan collective whose primary concern is to provide technical support to local communities under fire in order that they might document lived experience of the conflict on their own terms.

Lens on Lebanon is urgently seeking donations of small hand-held cameras, digital cameras and digital video tape stock, as well as the necessary accessories like battery chargers, memory sticks and firewire cables. Donations of money to cover the costs of transporting the equipment to the region, travel expenses for volunteers and overall maintenance expenses, can be made securely through PayPal on our support page.

Visit the site for some amazing postings, including transcripts of first-person interviews of Lebanese recounting their experiences during the war, some nuanced commentary and description of the current social and political reconstruction, and a video letter filmed during the war by a film and cinema collective which runs the yearly Ayam Beirut Al Cinema’iya Film Festival.