Global Issues
Films Shrink Global Problems Down to a More Human Scale
'It's bad to be rich at the height of fame with your morals a dirty shame,' says Valter pointedly as he bumps along in the back of a pickup towards Jardim Gramacho, the largest landfill in the world, located in Brazil.
Captured on screen in the film 'Waste Land', Valter is one of 3,000 pickers, or catadores, who work at Jardim Gramacho pulling 200 tonnes of recyclable material per day from the garbage deposited there.
Documentaries 'The Sound of Mumbai: A Musical', 'The Boy Mir: Ten Years in Afghanistan', and Academy Award-nominated 'Waste Land' were screened on Friday and Saturday as part of the third annual 'Envision: Addressing Global Issues Through Documentaries', a joint programme of the U.N. Department of Public Information and the Independent Filmmaker Project.
This year's theme was eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, one of eight U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to be achieved by 2015.
Evocative and richly detailed, the films highlighted certain qualities in each individual they portrayed, be they dignity, intelligence, humour, or determination. The timeless wisdom of Valter and the youthful hope and exuberance of Ashish, star of 'Sound of Mumbai', brought their stories to life, converting them from mere faces on a screen to people with touching depth of character yet living a world away.
In addition to the films, the programme featured panels of experts discussing topics from the use of documentary filmmaking to food security to the role of women in combating hunger and poverty. Today, 925 million people globally remain undernourished, or one out of seven. Seventy percent of the hungry are women and girls.
Panelists underscored the need for films to craft compelling stories so that audience members stop seeing someone as an 'other' and instead as a fellow human being.
Crafting the individual's story
With films, one panelist, Lina Srivastava, told IPS, 'You can tell stories that are… a little more human as opposed to that sort of top down perspective that we always get of us helping the other. You realise there is no other.'
Srivastava is on the board of directors of Global Grassroots, a nonprofit that facilitates conscious change in communities to help women. She is also former executive director of with Kids with Cameras, a nonprofit established to raise awareness about the children from the documentary Born Into Brothels.
One way to evoke the human aspect in stories, Srivastava said in a panel about the role of women in combating poverty, is to tell tales of the individual. She spoke to the power of films and media in this task, because 'what we really need is access to information and the ability to tell… stories.'
Additionally, stories need to be compelling, in both the people and the places they portray.
Filmmakers also have another responsibility - to be respectful to the people they film. 'The more you craft stories that are respectful, the more people are going to be used to those images as opposed to negative images,' Srivastava told IPS, and the more people will understand why they need to help.
'Sounds of Mumbai', the story of kids from the slums of Mumbai selected to perform songs from 'The Sound of Music', intersperses scenes of hardscrabble life in Mumbai - tiny homes, tents by the side of the road, chickens roaming freely, thin men squatting on corners - with rehearsals and interviews with the children.
Not only did the adults involved in the 'Sound of Music' production believe that being part of the production would show the children a different but achievable reality, but Ashish's own family also recognised the potential for change — even if it's a long shot. 'Ashish can get us out,' his older brother says in the film.
Bridging the gap between rhetoric and action
Arguably one of the greatest challenges of the MDGs is transforming stated goals into concrete results. 'Waste Land' showed precisely that transformation as it chronicled the project of Vik Muniz, a Brazilin-born artist, and several catadores from Jardim Gramacho to create portraits from recyclable materials. Muniz then photographed the portraits, and gave the proceeds from their sales back to the pickers and the community.
'Another power of stories is that you can actually spur direct action,' said Srivastava. For example, 'The Devil Came on Horseback', a documentary about genocide in Darfur, led people to divest from companies operating in Sudan.
'Filmmakers can leverage the power of the way they tell stories to lead people to action or to lead people to a change in their perceptions,' she told IPS.
Divestment, however, is only one method of action. Rebeca Grynspan, an under-secretary-general at U.N. Development Programme and panelist on Saturday, acknowledged that implementation and execution of plans are major difficulties in the fight against poverty.
'The whole issue is: how do we make it happen?' she said. 'The truth is that we need… the grassroots organisations themselves getting involved in the transformations themselves.' She suggested that civil society must lead the change it wishes to see.
She and other panelists emphasised that the best way to fight poverty is to invest in women and girls, who remain a hidden and underutilised yet crucial resource.
An enduring dignity
'I am not self-conscious; I have confidence… I can do everything,' went Ashish's mantra.
Despite living in abject poverty with limited opportunity to escape it, Ashish's spunk, determination, and imagination shone during moments of beauty, including a highly existential, albeit one-sided, conversation that Ashish held with a parrot about life inside a cage.
In 'Waste Land', the women at Jardim Gramacho remain determined to survive with dignity. 'It's not a future,' one of the women, Isis, conceded. Yet they agreed that picking through trash was far better than a life of prostitution.
The film also continued to capture the wisdom and inner strength of Valter. 'Ninety-nine is not 100,' he stated simply in the film, explaining what he would say to people when they asked if recycling just one can made a difference. Indeed, a single can makes all the difference in the world.
© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service