My city just hosted a four-day documentary film festival. The festival showcased stories from 25 countries and exposed audiences to a different sense of humanity; a humanity often ignored at the giant Cineplex Odeon.
Dinner With The President: A Nation’s Journey, directed by Sabiha Sumar, proceeds with questions in hand about democracy in the Islamic culture of Pakistan straight to the dinner table of President Pervez Musharraf.
Recycled Life chronicles the past 60 years in the lives of generations of families who have lived and worked, not in family-owned restaurants or Wal-Mart or at the local diner, but in the Guatemala City Garbage Dump, a humongous Central American landfill.
And did you know that at 18 years old girls in Israel are forced into military service? To See If I’m Smiling
gives voice to these girl soldiers and immerses the audience into the emotions and experiences of their tours of duty.
The whole attraction and need for sidewalk-type festivals like these is that they get into the underbelly of a country or expose aches within cultures that so often get misinterpreted or ignored. For an audience, it fills a need to witness something true and organic and to learn something real.
Do you ever check out these kinds of film festivals? If you have, have they changed your ideas about humanity or the world?
Image credit: tabrandt
Latest Comments
Comments