Sadly, Manufacturing Consent is a film which will never age. It is as relevant to the time when it was first born, as it is to tomorrow's brave new world. Our film is a modular essay, a colliding collage of ideas and mediated meditations brought on by the End Game in these End Times. Or are these now the Just-Times, and only just beginning? Our film is a dream about the reality of documentary illusion and the possibilities of alternative media and the democratic digital webplex which sometimes clashes with megacorps and the world wide web of deceit brought on by the ongoing imperial media war. The war for our minds.

Our film is cinemanic expression brought forward by a search for answers in the wild world of mass communication. It's questions cross countries and centuries, from Japan to North America, from pamphleteers to new media, next media and now media. These questions cross platforms: from voice to print to screen. These questions are resident, and now find resonance, in the digital domain. This film, when applied to contemporary life, is an argument for the fusion of nu-technology and documental democracy which must emerge, in the (un)civil(ized) infowars to come. It's a call to arm ourselves with new pacifist weapons for intellectual self-defense, as Chomsky would call it. This film is an attempt to pour our work and activism into the forge of human service, to melt down the division between hardtool-ware and softcode-ware - to pound them into the ploughshares of new media-ware. Or media aware-ness. In other words, let us become our own media masters, let's re-appropriate our own media away from megamedia fakirs, consumption slave artists and mass media mind colonizers. Let us robin hoodwink them, transforming our art-works into real media for real masses. Into documocracy. Into a world where we are no longer passive consumers but ordinary people who are both producers and users of their own media, or what I call citizen produsers. This is what documentary is all about.

All artists, documentarians and indeed, citizens of Japan and abroad, owe it to the future to speak out against injustice wherever it may lie. Lie is the operative word of this age. I feel that moral, social, academic, professional and educational responsibility is forever necessary. Especially in these times, when the Earth itself in at the point of exhaustion. Because I am a failed journalism student, most of my life's work, through films like Manufacturing Consent, is my own small revenge on journalism. In essence, I make media about media. Perhaps, because I lack imagination. Or perhaps because I believe my own media profession is vital. Just as the 19th century Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh had to study the old classics before he could allow himself to splash yellow paint around and create the greatest paintings of all time, so too, we as makers media, and as watchers, owe it to ourselves to study our own world, and to reflect upon the impact of the most important ether of our time, the mass media which envelop us all. Media is the air we breathe. It is the language we speak. In Japan, and everywhere, Media is the language of today, and tomorrow. I hope that our film can act as one simple guidepost, pointing towards a more hopeful world.

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