ESoDoc – European Social Documentary, is a training initiative of- fered by ZeLIG, Italy’s trilingual film school, and one of the handful of European educational institutions that focuses exclusively on doc- umentary filmmaking. ESoDoc is supported by a network of world- wide institutions and the European Union’s MEDIA Programme. ESoDoc explores wholly new terrain. It takes up the challenge of bringing together the demands of different players now involved in documentary film-production. Across the spectrum these are: independent documentary filmmakers and producers, non-government and non profit-making organizations (NGOs and NPOs), television broadcasters and the growing range of New Media professionals creating both web-documentaries and crossmedia productions.

Now Web 2.0 is no longer ‘new’ and as filmmakers we talk about crossmedia or ‘multi-platform programming’ as the way of creating our films, sharing information and encouraging collaboration among our audiences, who are users as well as viewers. We make use of the tools now available to support our documentary films like blogging, photo sharing and the mobile phone, we access social networks like Facebook and MySpace, we research and promote our films on Youtube.
If you join ESoDoc we will open your eyes to the vast scope of this digital world and we will teach you how to use it in your film making, but we will not forget the traditional documentary film. Whatever the genre we will show you that the essential documentary film requirements are the same: a universal theme, a unique viewpoint and a strong narrative.
Our aim is to teach documentary filmmakers to use the old and new technologies to make films about human rights and environmental protection that involve the global communities, draw attention to injustices and campaign, in a small way, to make the world a better place.