OTHER WORLDS ARE BREATHING (AUSTRALIA): film SYNOPSES
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Thursday 2 – Saturday 4 March 2006
The Loft, Level 4, Bldg Z2, QUT Creative Industries Precinct
Musk Avenue, Kelvin Grove, Brisbane
Rumble In Mumbai
Work in Progress
The Lijjat Sisterhood
Peace One Day
Nazrah: A Muslim Woman's Perspective
Karen Education Surviving
Juchitán Queer Paradise
Traje: Women and Weaving in Guatemala
Red Butterflies Where Two Springs Merge
El Mundo del Malek
The Art of Viye Dibe - The Intelligent Hand
Yellow Fella
Waterworks India: Four Engineers and a Manager
An Evergreen Island
Money
Thirst
Legends of Madiba
The Rockstar and The Mullahs
Dumpster Divers
Pretty Dyana
Cardboard Days
Venezuela Bolivariana: People and Struggle of the Fourth World War
The Take
| RUMBLE IN MUMBAI | 58 minutes | 2004 | Filmed in India |
The film documents the last World Social Forum held in Mumbai, India, in January 2004. Over 100,000 people attended, all looking to build solidarity and a better world. In keeping with the spirit of the forum, the film provides a platform for marginalised voices to air their grievances. It is also full of high-calibre critiques of neo-liberalism and damning indictments of the ill effects of globalisation.
Director: Jawad Metni
Producer: Jawad Metni, Pinhole Pictures, USA
| WORK IN PROGRESS: THE WSF 2004 | 59 minutes | 2004 | Filmed in India |
This film has made its journey from being a document of an event to becoming an impression of a worldwide movement for economic, political and cultural justice and a travelogue of ideas for change. The World Social Forum began in Brazil in the year 2000 as a space for defining alternatives to globalisation, economic imperialism, war and discrimination. In 2004, it's fourth year, it came to Bombay and widened its horizons to include issues of gender, indigenous people's rights, alternative sexuality, women and war, caste and racism. For 5 days people protested and analysed existing economic, political and social injustice; celebrated alternatives and resistance through speeches, processions, music, debate, performance, conversation; and sharpened their imagination of a better world with diversity and justice at its heart, under a common slogan; Another World Is Possible. This film has been created from video material gathered by student crews to document this 5-day event.
Director: Paromita Vohra
Producer: WSF India
| PEACE ONE DAY | 80 minutes | 2004 | Filmed all over the world |
It is the story of one man's attempt to persuade the global community via the United Nations to officially sanction a global ceasefire day. This film charts a remarkable 5-year journey, showing the viewer how an individual genuinely can make a difference.
Director: Jeremy Gilley
Producer: Jeremy Gilley, A Peace One Day production in association with the BBC and Passion Pictures, UK
| THE LIJJAT SISTERHOOD | 30 minutes | 2003 | Filmed in India |
More than four decades ago, seven women in a lower middle class suburb of Mumbai began a journey towards self-reliance. Today, more than 42,000 others have joined them in this 3,000 million rupee grassroots level movement called the Shri Mahila Griha Udyog' Lijjat Papad. The film looks at what it means to be part of this sisterhood through the eyes of four protagonists, their colleagues and families.
Director: Kadambari Chintamani and Ajit Oomen
Producer: Public Service Broadcasting Trust, India
| NAZRAH: A MUSLIM WOMAN'S PERSPECTIVE | 55 minutes | 2003 | Filmed in USA |
Nazrah is an intimate look at a diverse group of Muslim women living in the Pacific Northwest in the USA. The women discuss their views on Islam, current political events and how they reflect on the image of Islam in the West. They also talk about the difficulty of achieving equality within the Muslim community while fighting stereotypical portrayals of Muslim women in the US media.
Director and Producer: Farah Nousheen, USA
Distributor: Alex O. Williams, Arab Films Distribution, USA
| KAREN EDUCATION SURVIVING | 30 minutes | 2003 | Filmed in Burma |
This film focuses upon the realities of Karen villagers who live internally displaced throughout the Karen state of Burma. It specifically examines how Karen people organize their schools even as they struggle to survive the Burmese military junta's genocidal activities against them. This film has been created by Karen people and represents Karen perspectives on the socio-political context in which they find themselves.
Directors and Producers: Scott O' Brien and Saw Eh Do Wah
| JUCHITÁN QUEER PARADISE | 65 minutes | 2002 | Filmed in Mexico |
Located near the border with Guatemala, the Mexican town of Juchitán is home to the Zapotec Indians, who have shown remarkable tolerance towards homosexuals. According to a legend, God gave Vicente Ferrer, the patron saint of Juchitán, a bagful of queers. Everywhere he travelled - Colombia, Central America, Guatemala - he left behind a homosexual. In Juchitán, however, his bag came undone, and they all fell out at once...
Director: Patricio Henriquez
Producers: Robert Cornellier, Patricio Henriquez and Raymonde Provencher, Macumba International Inc, Canada
| TRAJE: WOMEN AND WEAVING IN GUATEMALA | 10 minutes | 2004 | Filmed in Guatemala |
Traje looks at the transmission of culture and identity via weaving and the wearing of traje in Guatemala. Traje refers to the customary clothing of the 28 existing Mayan language groups strewn across Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. It is made and worn almost exclusively by women, who are the guardians of the tradition. Today, the pressures of changing values, global economies, and racial discrimination are threatening the Mayan weaving practice, but there is resistance.
Director & Producer: Phoebe Hart, hartflicker, Guatemala / Australia
| RED BUTTERFLIES WHERE TWO SPRINGS MERGE | 14 minutes | 2002 | Filmed in Kyrgyzstan |
In the border mountain village of Achy-Kaindy, 64-year-old Janyl pursues the tradition of making felt carpets. She never relied on anyone, least of all on the government and modern industrial technologies. After the break-up of the Soviet-Union, Janyl became famous in Europe and the director of her own workshop. Yet she didn't change her lifestyle or her independent anti-patriarchal views.
Directors: Gaukhar Sydykova and Dilia Ruzieva
Producers: Soros Foundation, The Network Women's Programme of the Open Society Institute, Kyrgystan, and the Institute of Social and Gender Policy, Russia
| EL MUNDO DEL MALEK | 11 minutes | 2004 | Filmed in Ecuador |
The Paladines live and work as puppeteers in Ecuador. It is not easy to survive being an artist there. The film tells the story of Malek's lucky break: His transformation into a dragon.
Directors: Natalie Muntermann and Andrea Schultens
Producers: Natalie Muntermann and Andrea Schultens, Germany
| THE ART OF VIYE DIBA - THE INTELLIGENT HAND | 53 minutes | 2003 | Filmed in Senegal |
Viye Diba, a Senegalese artist living in Dakar, says that he is not an African artist, but a modern artist living in Africa. His work has evolved from small format paintings to increasingly large metaphorical installations. Whether exploring the mysteries of communication, or in the use of raw and recycled materials, his work raises environmental and socio-political questions and also explores the vital role of Art.
Director: Claudine Pommier
Producer: Claudine Pommier, Arts in Action Society, Canada / Senegal
| YELLOW FELLA | 25 minutes | 2005 | Filmed in Australia |
In 1978, Tom Lewis appeared in the Australian feature film, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. The life of the character he played was hauntingly close to his own, a young, restless man of mixed heritage, struggling for a foothold on the edge of two cultures. Tom's mother is a traditional Indigenous woman of southern Arnhem Land, his father a Welsh stockman who he never really knew.
Yellow Fella is a journey across the land and into Tom's past, as he attempts to find the resting place of his father and to finally confront the truth of his most inner feelings of love and identity.
Director: Ivan Sen
Producer: Citt Williams, CAAMA
| WATERWORKS INDIA | 22 minutes | 1998 | Filmed in India |
This film talks about five unsung people, who have kept the intricate traditional science of water management alive from the modern onslaught. Four of them are engineers and one is a water manager. The documentary introduces the viewers to the techniques as well as the social management practices governing it.
Director: Pradip Saha
Producer: Pradip Saha, Centre for Science and Environment, India
| AN EVERGREEN ISLAND | 45 minutes | 2000 | Filmed in Papua New Guinea |
In 1989, the landowners of central Bougainville closed down one of the world's largest copper mines that was destroying their land. A military blockade was imposed around the island. A film about a pacific people who have survived 9 years without assistance from outside.
Directors and Producers: Amanda King and Fabio Cavadini, Australia
| MONEY | 65 minutes | 2003 | Filmed in Turkey, Argentina & USA |
Two years ago, thousands of people in Turkey and Argentina took to the streets and attacked banks when their life savings evaporated overnight. How could these relatively wealthy countries go bankrupt in less than a decade? Isitan takes us to Turkey, Argentina and the US portraying citizens who have lost everything, and how people initiated credit and barter systems, developing local parallel economies.
Director: Isaac Isitan
Producers: Carole Poliquin and Isaac Isitan, Les productions ISCA, Canada
| THIRST | 62 minutes | 2004 | Filmed in Bolivia, India & the US |
Is water a basic human right for all people? Or is it a commodity to be bought, sold, and traded in the global marketplace? 'Thirst' tells the stories of communities in Bolivia, India, and the United States that are asking these fundamental questions culminating in the events that took place at the 2003 Third World Water Forum in Kyoto, Japan.
Directors: Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman
Producer: Snitow-Kaufman Productions, USA
| THE LEGENDS OF MADIBA | 45 minutes | 2003 | Filmed in South Africa |
The experiences of Nelson Mandela's favourite performers demonstrate the vital role that music plays in the face of racism and oppression. The magnetic Canadian/South African performer Lorraine Klaasen indroduces us to five remarkable ladies including her mother, Tandie Klaasen. We learn about their music and their experiences during the disruptive years of apartheid. We see how important music is in the life of South Africa and how correct Mandela was when he said the legends have a real "hunger to sing".
Director: Helen Henshaw
Producer: Henshaw Productions, Canada
| THE ROCKSTAR AND THE MULLAHS | 50 minutes | 2003 | Filmed in Pakistan |
"Why can't spirituality be expressed in a pop song?" asks Salman Ahmad, Pakistan's most famous pop musician and the lead singer of Junoon. Salman is Muslim and very concerned about Pakistan's growing religious intolerance that condemns music as obscene. His quest takes him across Pakistan into the Islamic schools, and eventually to Peshawar, where the local government has banned the playing of music in public.
Directors: Ruhi Hamid and Angus Macqueen
Producer: Rebecca Morris, October Films, UK
| DUMPSTER DIVERS | 5 minutes | 2003 | Filmed in Australia |
Nat and John are activists that bypass the food on supermarket shelves and wait for nightfall to raid the bins out the back of the stores. 'Dumpsters' are full of 'just past the use-by date' produce - food that is a day or two too old but still perfectly edible. Dumpster Divers reveals an inventive way to find a meal and deal with the serious problem of waste. This mini-doc is a useful 'how to' with instant audience appeal. Already it has converted thousands of potential dumpster divers at screenings and broadcasts throughout the world.
Director & Producer: Phoebe Hart
| PRETTY DYANA | 45 minutes | 2003 | Filmed in Serbia |
An intimate look at Gypsy refugees in a Belgrade suburb who make a living by transforming Citroen 2CV and Dyana cars into Mad Max-like recycling vehicles, which they use to collect cardboard, bottles and scrap metal. These modern horses mean freedom, hope and style for their crafty owners. Even the car batteries are used as power generators in order to get some light, watch TV and recharge mobiles! Almost an alchemist's dream come true! But the police do not always find these strange vehicles so funny.
Director: Boris Mitic
Producer: Boris Mitic, Dribbling Pictures, Serbia
| CARDBOARD DAYS | 51 minutes | 2003 | Filmed in Argentina |
The film casts disturbing light on the biggest economic and social crisis in Argentina's history and the ways it impacts on broad sectors of the population. It focuses on the lives and labour of the so-called cartoneros, who scavenge the streets and rubbish tips of the richer districts of Buenos Aires in search of cardboard, to sell for a pittance. Cardboard Days also serves as a reflection on the remorseless Megalopolis, recycling, alternative lifestyles and economic inequity.
Director: Verónica Souto
Producer: Justo Daract, Argentina
| VENEZUELA BOLIVARIANA | 76 minutes | 2004 | Filmed in Venezuela |
The film examines the Bolivarian revolution of Venezuela from the Caracazo riots of 1989 to the massive actions that brought revolutionary president Hugo Chávez back to power, 48 hours after a US-led military coup in 2002. It also shows how the people exercise what is called in the popular movement 'Revolution within the Revolution'. The film focuses on how the Bolivarian revolution transcends the national frontiers of Venezuela and contributes to the fight against neoliberal capitalism.
Director: Marcelo Andrade Arreaza
Producer: Jose Lino Andrade, Calle y Media, Venezuela, Mexico and USA
| THE TAKE | 87 minutes | 2004 | Filmed in Argentina |
In suburban Buenos Aires, Argentina, thirty unemployed auto-parts workers walk into their idle factory, roll out sleeping mats and refuse to leave. All they want is to re-start the silent machines. But this simple act -The Take - has the power to turn the globalisation debate on its head. What shines through in the film is the workers' demand for dignity and the searing injustice of dignity denied.
Director: Avi Lewis
Producer: Naomi Klein, Klein Lewis Productions, Canada
"Another world is not only possible, she's on her way.... [O]n a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing."
Arundhati Roy, WSF 2003
