Film-anthropy

Filmaker Gini Reticker's Pray the Devil Back to Hell took top honors this week for Best Documentary Feature at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. Produced by philanthropist Abigail Disney, the documentary tells the story of how Christian and Muslim women in Liberia—despite religious and ethnic differences—united in 2003 to bring an end to their nation's bloody civil war.

According to Disney, it took her and Reticker 18 months to make the film: few international media networks saved footage of the peace effort, while others failed to film it as it evolved, believing it not to be important.

In a recent interview with Contribute Media Online, Disney said that during a trip to Liberia, she learned of the movement, then realized the unusual alliance was in the process of being forgotten. "The story about the Liberian women peacemakers was in the air—but in little pieces, like shards of a broken thing you want to put back together—only this story was missing some pieces," Disney said.

"I know from women’s history and women’s literature through the centuries that women do things and then we forget them—and then the next time a group of women attempts to do something similar, everybody thinks that women are doing it for the very first time," Disney added. "It seemed to me that here I was a witness to the erasure of a historical moment and I had the capacity to prevent that from happening."

To see an excerpt of that film, plus Contribute Media Online's full interview with Abigail Disney, click HERE.

Other highlights of this year's festival included a new screening of the The Devil Came by Horseback, film-maker Annie Sundberg's award-winning 2007 documentary about former U.S. Marine Capt. Brian Stiedle's experiences as an unarmed observer for the African Union in Darfur in 2004. "Brian provided the eyes through which to tell Americans about the genocide in Darfur," Sundberg told CauseGlobal. "With this film, I was seeking the story behind the headlines."

Both Sundberg's and Disney's films are stories about dislocated African cultures and the struggle for peace—in one case, successful, and in the case of Darfur, still blatantly unresolved.

Here's the trailer from The Devil Came on Horseback:



What do you think?

(photo by Dan Demetriad)

Pangea Day

At the Skoll Foundation's annual think-fest for social entrepreneurs at Oxford University a few weeks ago, Ken Brecher, a social anthropologist and executive director of the Sundance Institute—organizers of the annual Sundance film festival—defined good storytelling as an increasingly powerful tool for social change globally. "...Storytelling is the refusal to be laid low, incapacitated; it helps us to understand the meaning of things, not simply the value...The purpose of a good storytelling," he said, "is to assist us all to understand and to operate in the open and not wildly in the dark."

To be sure, documentary film—images, captured words, sounds—is the premier art form in today's globalizing world, Brecher believes: it is the medium of the moment. "At any one time," he says, "there is only one art form that is speaking. Once it was dance, then it was poetry, then the short story. Today it is film, and it feels to me that we need to make that connection now if we really want to see change happen in the world."

Indeed. This blog, Cause Global, is a new blog—one that will cover this art form-of-the-moment and the connections it makes (and attempts to make) globally. Ultimately, this blog will track some of the news and ideas and people in today's world who are seeking to use social media to to make a difference, affect change, and use the Web to make solutions to common social problems profitable—and real. Why this? I'm a journalist, and for me it's all about covering the unlikely alliances and conversations that serve as catalysts to social change and problem-solving around common challenges. Storytelling is a big part of today's social change movement—one that packs the emotional resonance to cut through the noise of everyday media. "In storytelling," says Brecher, "you have to incline the ears of your heart."

Storytelling moves to the masses this spring with Pangea Day, documentary filmmaker Jenhane Noujaim's 2006 TED Festival dream-come-true. Noujaim, whose 2004 film, Control Room, exposed the divergent ways Arabs and the West covered the onset and outbreak of the Iraq war, is one of the catalysts behind this spring's globally-produced Pangea Day, scheduled for May 10. The live event is planned as a simulcast of films, speakers, and music; sites in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked live that day to produce a 4-hour program, which will air on the Internet, television, digital cinemas, and mobile phones.

Raised in both Egypt and the United States, Noujaim says her aim is to explore culture as a driving force for both conflict and possibility. "I want to use the power of film to bridge gaps between people," she says. "...How are people supposed to communicate with each other globally...or move together into the future...when their stories aren't being told?"

What do you think? Check out the official trailer for Pangea Day HERE.