Taken from The IBA YEARBOOK 1981. Page 28 and 29.
In May and June 1980 the first three programmes in ATV's occasional documentary series Frontier were transmitted.
Set in South America, the one-hour films were produced and directed by Brian Moser, formerly the originator and editor of Granada's Disappearing World series. As a geologist - before he became a filmmaker - Moser spent several years living and working in South America. He developed a lasting interest and love of the continent and its’ people, which is now reflected in Frontier.
Moser describes what his aim was in making these films: 'I wanted to show some of the ways in which individuals manage to survive on the edge of society at the limit of what we call "civilisation". In the Third World there are millions of people who struggle to exist, whether they are in city slums, eroded over-grazed plains and mountainsides, or in uncut forests, under conditions which bear no relation to those we consider acceptable for normal living. Only at times of natural disaster, crisis or revolution do these "belts of misery" and "slums of despair" reach our television screens to reveal the immediate and sensational, to shock and arouse our liberal sentiments of paternalism, pity and concern.'
The first three Frontier films dealt with three very fundamental issues - the over expanding city, the often desperate need for land, and finally the rush for mineral wealth.
It is rare for television documentaries to examine in some detail, as Frontier does, the humdrum everyday existence and problems of the Third World poor; it is also rare for the people to be allowed to speak for themselves. For Moser this was an essential prerequisite of his series. By the use of subtitles giving an English translation of the people's actual words, he hopes the viewer will gain a true understanding of their conditions of survival. A washerwoman, a garbage picker, a landless peasant, a group of illicit emerald prospectors, all tell of their own predicaments, their problems, their hopes for the future. In many cases their hope and resilience is amazing. For these people there is no dole, they survive by whatever means they can.
'People of the Barrio', the first Frontier film, looked at what it is like to live in one of South America's largest slums, in Ecuador's main port, Guayaquil. Moser focused on six of the half-million inhabitants of the Barrio slums, who describe how they and their families eke out a living in bamboo shacks built on stilts over the disease-ridden man-grove swamps. They have no running water, little electricity, a few primitive roads, no sewerage and no legal title to the land. To win their confidence before beginning filming,Moser moved into the Barrio for seven months with his wife Caroline, herself a lecturer an anthropology. and their two sons, Nathaniel aged 6, and Titus, 8. They built their own shack and shared the appalling conditions of the local people. None of the Moser family appeared in 'People of the Barrio', but the film was based on Caroline Moser's research and she also provided the commentary.
In the second film, ‘Ranchers of the Sierra’, Moser concentrated on two men who have opened up new land on the Colombian-Venezuelan border: one an English settler Ben Curry, who went to Colombia 23 years ago and bought a ranch, and the other Sebastian Galvez, a local peasant. With their contrasting backgrounds, the two pioneers were operating from a different range of choices, yet the challenges they faced from the environment were much the same. Today Ben Curry has a thriving cattle ranch. but with all the good land at the foot of the Sierra (colonised and settled, landless peasants like Sebastian must cross the watershed - the mountainous frontier with Venezuela - to cut down and burn the forest for their new homesteads.
For 'Emerald Miners of Muzo'. the third progromme in the series, Moser went to the Colombian Andes South America to visit the richest emerald mine in the world. There, each year in the wet season up to 20,000 men, women and children ‘guaceros’ - illicit prospectors are lured to the river Edd below the mine to search for emeralds the mine-owning Syndicate might have missed, traditionally one of the most violent occupations in the world. At Muzo there is a death a day from violence and gang-warfare.
Future programmes in the Frontier series will continue to examine the lnterface between 20th Century man and the world that has resisted him for centuries. It will show, the conditions which prevail on the margins of society, and it will do this through allowing the people to speak for themselves.