Manifesto

OurFrame is an independent media and production company.

We bring together journalistic and artistic creation, research and experimentation to change the way works are funded, produced, distributed and evaluated.

As a non⁠-⁠profit, we work with creators, researchers and audiences to develop media that serve the common good.

Media that bring society together

Manifesto 01 / 11

We created OurFrame because we lacked tools.

Ways to fund, produce and circulate journalistic and artistic works with a shared ambition: to contribute to a society able to understand itself and to act together.

Manifesto 02 / 11

An investigation can call a certainty into question.

• A film can bring us closer to an experience that was foreign to us.

• A story can open a conversation we no longer knew how to have.

We want to give these possibilities the means to exist, to reach their audiences and to carry their effects beyond distribution.

Manifesto 03 / 11

Our horizon is a society in which everyone can live with dignity, within the limits of what the planet can sustain.

Doughnut economics, developed by Kate Raworth, gives us a framework for thinking jointly about human needs, social justice and the balance of the living world. Scientific knowledge and the experience of the people concerned inform the choices we make.

Manifesto 04 / 11

These choices are built with audiences.

Their lived experience, their disagreements and their aspirations must be able to alter the questions we ask, the stories we tell and the changes we pursue. Bringing people together requires making room for what divides us and looking for what allows us to move forward together.

Manifesto 05 / 11

We bring creation, behavioural science, the measurement of effects and funding together in a single approach. Before producing, we spell out what we hope to make possible, for whom and under what conditions. We design the encounter with the audience from the outset. Then we seek to understand what really happens.

Manifesto 06 / 11

Journalistic and artistic freedom is essential to this work.

• An investigation must be able to unsettle a partner.

• A director must be able to challenge our framing.

• A work must be able to contradict our convictions.

Our methods serve to explore these choices and their consequences; they leave open the conclusions of the investigation and the form of the work.

Manifesto 07 / 11

This freedom commits everyone to taking the effects of their work seriously.

We ask the projects we support for an explicit intention and a sincere willingness to learn. We make room for works whose effects are hard to grasp or take time.

We refuse to use a cause for the sake of our image, to make audiences feel guilty or to instrumentalise people without concern for the consequences.

Manifesto 08 / 11

Facts and plurality are not negotiable.

For our journalistic work, they are the conditions of impact, never a means in its service. We check before we publish, we separate what we know from what we hope, and we make room for the voices that contradict the effect we are looking for. A result obtained by twisting a fact or leaving out a point of view is not impact; it is manipulation.

Manifesto 09 / 11

When the expected effects do not materialise, we share what we have learned.

We rework, test again and redirect resources when the results warrant it. We hold to this standard even in the projects we care about most.

Manifesto 10 / 11

OurFrame is a Swiss non⁠-⁠profit company.

Its surpluses are reinvested in its mission. From Switzerland, we want to help change media practices, share our tools and develop them with creators, researchers, audiences and partners from other regions.

Manifesto 11 / 11

We want those who carry a necessary story within them to find the means to create it freely, to bring it to its audience and to understand its effects.

Building these conditions is what we work on.