By Ralph Dannheiser
Special Correspondent
Washington — Web-savvy filmmakers are getting the chance to focus attention on wide-ranging efforts being made to conquer some of the developing world’s most pressing problems — and to win $20,000 in the process.
ViewChange.org, a new multimedia website due to go live at the end of October, is sponsoring a short-film competition, which it says “aims to find meaningful stories showing how international development efforts are impacting and improving the lives of the world’s poorest people and making progress toward achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.”
“Tell your story. Change the world,” the contest home page invites filmmakers.
The U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals were adopted by all 192 member states and 23 of the world’s leading development institutions following a conference at U.N. headquarters in New York in 2000.
The goals range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education — all by the target date of 2015. Other goals involve advancing universal education, gender equality, child health, maternal health, environmental sustainability and global partnership toward achieving these ends.
The video contest, designed to inspire further action to improve social and economic conditions in developing countries, is open to both professional and amateur filmmakers.
ViewChange — being funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — is an offshoot of Link TV, which was launched in 1999 as a noncommercial American satellite television network that describes itself as providing “diverse global perspectives on news, current events and world culture not typically available on other U.S. networks.”
Entrants in the video content must pack their message of change into an ultra-small parcel. As the Link TV website puts it, the sponsors seek “powerful five-minute films” that answer the question, “What are people doing to help end poverty, disease, hunger, conflict, inequality, and illiteracy?”
The website displays a handful of films already submitted — films that are emblematic of the sort the sponsors hope to receive:
• Seeds of Hope: Cambodia sketches the story of a community-based initiative that instituted a local rice-seed credit bank, improving the lot of poverty-stricken rural villagers and allowing them to mount health and nutrition programs for their children.
• Garbage Dreams, narrated by Adham, a 17-year-old trash worker, focuses on a village on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt, that houses 60,000 Zaballeen — Arabic for “garbage people.” Having eked out a living for generations by collecting and recycling Cairo’s waste — their recycling rate is 80 percent, Adham proudly proclaims — they maintain what could be the world’s most efficient waste disposal system. But the film finds them threatened by new competition from multinational garbage disposal companies that rely on landfills.
• Chocolate Country relates the self-help story of the founding of the Loma Guacnojo cooperative, which has allowed more than 200 poor Dominican cacao farmers to circumvent exploitive middlemen and market their own output.
Film entries will compete in one of six categories: sustainability, demonstrating solutions that will last; innovation, new solutions to old problems; overcoming conflict, such as cultural barriers or war; empowerment, showing people improving their own lives and those of others like them; leadership and governance, including citizen engagement in government; and local-global partnerships, reflecting teamwork between on-the-ground efforts and government, nongovernmental organizations and private initiatives.
The winner in each category will receive $5,000. The winner of the overall contest receives $20,000.
Online viewers will select two of five finalists in each category, while Link TV will name the other three. The category and overall winners then will be chosen by an international panel of judges from the arts and the political world.
Those judges will include Mexican actor-director Gael García Bernal, German director Wim Wenders, U.S. actor-director Danny Glover, U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye, Grammy Award-winning singer Angélique Kidjo from Benin, U.S. filmmaker and philanthropist Charles Annenberg Weingarten, and Nigerian-born Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Purple Hibiscus and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.
The contest announcement quotes Glover, a Link TV board member and U.N. goodwill ambassador, on the point of the contest. “There are countless beacons of success in eradicating poverty, hunger and disease in the developing world, but these stories rarely get told,” Glover said. “We know that stories have the power to change the world for the better, and these films will allow us to clearly show and share the meaningful progress that is happening on a daily basis.”
Submissions are due by August 31, with finalists to be announced in mid-September and winners in mid-October. The winners’ and finalists’ entries will be telecast in the United States on Link TV, and on other television channels worldwide.
Wendy Hanamura, vice president and general manager of Link TV, told America.gov that the response so far has met expectations, but that based on experience, “We’re looking for a groundswell in the last couple of weeks.” As for the submissions in hand, Hanamura said, “We’re especially excited to see top filmmakers participating.”
A Link TV spokesman said contestants can upload their entries at ViewChangeFilmContest.org. The complete contest rules are available on the Link TV website. |
