''Visionaries: Small Solutions to Enormously Large Problems'' is an Australian television series of

documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional film, motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a Recorded history, historical record". Bill Nichols (film critic), Bil ...

s written and directed by Tony Gailey and Julian Russell. Each of the seven films examines the work of a living person who is a revolutionary thinker in their field. What the subjects have in common is a creative contribution to humanity that has the potential to elicit a

paradigm shift A paradigm shift, a concept brought into the common lexicon by the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. Even though Kuhn restricted t ...

. They either apply a pragmatic

conceptual framework A conceptual framework is an analytical tool with several variations and contexts. It can be applied in different categories of work where an overall picture is needed. It is used to make conceptual distinctions and organize ideas. Strong conceptu ...

for addressing global socioeconomic problems, or a radical

scientific model Scientific modelling is a scientific activity, the aim of which is to make a particular part or feature of the world easier to understand, define, quantify, visualize, or simulate by referencing it to existing and usually commonly accepted ...

for understanding a

system A system is a group of Interaction, interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. A system, surrounded and influenced by its environment (systems), environment, is described by its boundaries, ...

. The

Australian Broadcasting Corporation The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is the national broadcaster of Australia. It is principally funded by direct grants from the Australian Government and is administered by a government-appointed board. The ABC is a publicly-own ...

premiered ''Visionaries'' in 1989;

Channel 4 Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network operated by the state-owned enterprise, state-owned Channel Four Television Corporation. It began its transmission on 2 November 1982 and was established to provide a four ...

in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

began transmitting the series in the following year. The series was produced by 220 Productions with funding from

Film Finance Corporation Australia The Film Finance Corporation Australia (FFC) was the government agency responsible for funding commercial productions of Australian film, documentary, and television from 1988 to 2008. Unlike other publicly funded organisations responsible for f ...

. The individual films have been published on VHS

home video Home video is prerecorded media sold or rented for home viewing. The term originates from the VHS and Betamax era, when the predominant medium was videotapes, but has carried over to optical disc formats such as DVD, Blu-ray and streaming me ...

and, in some cases, DVD.

Episodes

References

External links

* {{IMDb title, 1706666
Video clips from ''Midwives… Lullabies… and Mother Earth''
at Australian Screen 1989 Australian television series debuts 1993 Australian television series endings Australian documentary television films Documentary film series English-language television shows