CAN YOU FIND PEACE IN WAR? The San Luis-Obispo, CA based Peace Library is more art gallery than circulating book den, but the community behind it uses art and books to express their thoughts on peace, war, and politics.
Some of the book-based art featured in the Peace Library are drawn, like co-founder Julie Frankel’s “Forgiveness” (above, left), while other pieces are photographic or collage. Some are decidedly non-traditional form, like the matchbox with old-style movie tickets as the book’s “pages.” Each piece makes a deeply personal statement on war.
The Peace Library’s website currently features five galleries of work. See them at the Library’s official site.
THERE IS THE “BAREFOOT LAWYER” WHO FIGHTS INJUSTICE DOOR-TO-DOOR, and the wife—and husband—teams who turned around opinions about what equality means for women and men.
These and other gender justice pioneers are profiled in “Courage in the Heart,” a series of short films about young women in Bangladesh who are demanding greater rights for themselves.
The young women in these films all started out as survivors of human rights abuses, but today are educators, activists, and agents of change in their community. The “Courage in the Heart” project directly addresses the gender inequality of Bangladesh’s patriarchal social system, in which women have inferior status, and shows how empowered communities can improve women’s lives.
The stories you’ll hear demonstrate how far gender equality still has to go in places like Bangladesh.
Yet you’ll also see how education and community organizing can make a difference, especially in the poorest communities in the developing world.
The films were produced by BRAC, a development organization created and lead by Bangladeshis. BRAC works to alleviate poverty and promote gender justice and human rights in Asia, Africa, and Haiti.
Watch all the films and learn more at the project’s official site. More here about women fighting against gender violence.
THERE ACTUALLY IS NO PRESENT MOMENT, explains an astronomer in Patricio Guzmán’s latest film, Nostalgia for the Light. The Chilean director (The Battle of Chile, The Pinochet Case) once again grapples with time, and how memory affects the present and past. With this film, however, he’s crafted a magnificent meditation on memory by finding the link between two separate and seemingly different subjects: astronomy and human rights.
Nostalgia is set entirely in “the driest place on earth,” Chile’s Atacama Desert, home to some of the world’s most powerful celestial observatories. The Atacama is also where, after Pinochet’s military coup of September 1973, political prisoners were detained in concentration camps and bodies of murdered dissidents dumped and hidden in mass graves.
The dry, translucent air allows astronomers to discover the origins of the universe. It also preserves human remains, including those of Pre-Columbian mummies and 19th century miners.
Guzmán, who narrates his film, begins by exploring his love for astronomy and the wonders to be found in the sky. Guzmán lovingly films the workings of the telescope and interviews the stellar cartographers who map the cosmos.
The astronomers spend their lives looking up and looking back: everything they see is in the past. And they are looking far, far back in time.
This is not the case for the families of the disappeared. In this way Guzmán slowly reveals the driving force behind his film, and the connection to Chile’s recent past. The astronomers are not the only searchers in the Atacama desert.
There are also the women of Calama, an ever-dwindling group who comb the dry desert floor for bone fragments and remains, hoping to find evidence of their lost loved ones.
The astronomers look up, the women of Calama look down, and both groups look back, but with wholly different motivations.
Like an investigative journalist picking away at a story, Guzmán discovers all the people, alongside the astronomers, whose lives are tied to the Atacama: the archeologist who chronicles the pre-Colombian carvings on the rocky plains; and the architect and former dissident who used his drawing skills to memorize exactly, down to the square meter, the dimensions of the compound where prisoners were kept.
There is the young man, also an astronomer, whose mother is a torture survivor and today acts as a counselor to others like her; and the camp survivor who revisits the abandoned 19th century miners’ barracks that was converted to a detention camp. He demonstrates how a group of detainees, guided by a fellow prisoner, educated themselves in the constellations.
They even constructed a crude telescope out of wood to look at the stars. The astronomy “classes” did not last however, and they were ordered to stop, because their torturers believed they could use the constellations to plot their escape.
It all comes back to the stars. As a coda, there is the work one of the visiting scientists whose studies the stuff of star matter and the calcium in our bones. It’s all the same, he says. We are stardust. Is it so very ironic to discover this fact, and in this place, where individuals search for bones and stars and yet are looking for the same thing?
Two final scenes are poignant and pointed: two of the women of Calama are given an opportunity to look through one of the telescopes. Guzmán superimposes stardust floating around them.
The film ends with the twinkling lights of Chile’s modern capital, Santiago. It almost looks like one of the nebulae or galaxies we’ve been gazing at. Every night the center of the universe passes over Santiago, Guzmán narrates, but no one cares to notice. Chile denies its past, unwilling to face recent events and their consequences. It cannot exist, Guzmán says, or move forward, until it does.
THESE THREE BOOKS about children fall into different categories—nonfiction, Young Adult lit, and memoir—but all share unflinching, dramatic, and moving stories about what it is like for children facing injustice today.
You’ll want to read these more than once, and share them with your kids and friends:
1. This Child, Every Child This is the latest collaboration from teacher David J. Smith and illustrator Shelagh Armstrong, the team behind If the World Were a Village and If America Where a Village. Like those previous publications, This Child is a straight-up look at the disparities in the way children live around the world.
It’s a facts-driven book (“nearly 80 million children do not go to school”) but like the team’s previous work, it is eye-opening and a great tool for kids’ understanding of the world. Read an interview with David J. Smith here.
2. Between Shades of Gray Ruta Sepetys’ historical novel is about the forcible relocation of Lithuanians after the Russian invasion in 1939.
The story follows fifteen-year-old Lina, whose family is arrested and deported to Siberia.
Lina’s separation from her father, who is sentenced to death in a labor camp, forms the emotional heart of the novel.
The author is herself the daughter of a Lithuanian refugee. Read the first chapter here.
3. Little Princes: One Man’s Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal Over the course of Conor Grennan’s three-month volunteering stint at the Little Princes Orphanage, he learned most of the children were not in fact orphans, but had been trafficked. When Nepal enters civil war, Grennan is forced to leave, but vows to return and continue helping.
Little Princes is the story of how his organization, Next Generation Nepal, reunited almost 300 families with children thought lost. Read an excerpt here.
THE ROMA COMMUNITY IN EUROPE TODAY face discrimination and inadequate living conditions, lacking even the most basic needs like water, shelter, and electricity. Romani children are illegally segregated and denied their right to education.
Many EU governments take an anti-Romani stance; last year, France expelled Romani in widely reported incidents. Meanwhile, since 2008, violence against the Roma have increased.
The Roma live throughout Europe and have a population of 8 million. A new documentary, “Valea Corlatului” (The Corlat Valley), directed by Stephane Lucon, examines one community of 700 who have settled in a valley between the Brasov and Covasna counties in Romania. The film has just premiered as part of One World Romania, an international film festival on human rights.
Here is the trailer for the film. You can also watch more clips at the film’s official site. More here about Roma civil and human rights.
CAN YOU COUNT HOW MANY TIMES you’ve used water today? There’s the tap, the shower, the toilet, in your coffee or tea—for the developed, wealthy world, there is water, water everywhere, with many a drop to drink (or bathe in, or cook with). This isn’t the case for over a billion people on Earth.
Today is World Water Day, an international day of observance on the importance of the sustainable freshwater.
Water is a resource, and a business. Water is a human right, but in reality, it’s a luxury: more than 1 in 6 people in the world don’t have access to safe drinking water, according to The Water Project.
Here are three places to visit to learn more and take action for clean water:
Climate change, too, is causing stresses upon the world’s water supply. “When The Water Ends” tells the story of how drought conditions in East Africa threaten the livelihoods of local tribes. Watch the film by clicking on the link below:
As temperatures rise and water supplies dry up, semi-nomadic tribes along the Kenyan-Ethiopian border increasingly are coming into conflict with each other. When the Water Ends focuses on how worsening drought will pit groups and nations against one another. See the project at http://mediastorm.com/clients/when-the-water-ends-for-yale360
A ”SMASH” IS NATURALLY WHAT MOST MUSICIANS WANT, for their music to be heard, shared and enjoyed. Smashes equal popularity, and these days mainstream music, at least in the U.S., is concerned mostly with profits (and lack thereof), piracy, and the use of four-letter words in lyrics.
It’s a different picture in other parts of the world, of course, where music is also a product, but where it’s sometimes still an art, and a means of expression.
And when said expression is a political or social commentary, that’s when musicians find themselves censored, threatened, or imprisoned for their work and views. “Smashed Hits 2.0” examines how governments and other institutions censor and persecute far too many of the world’s musicians today.
The magazine features interviews and articles about those parts of the world where musical free expression is threatened—places like Iran, Turkey, and Tibet.
The publication is a collaboration with advocacy organization Freemuse.
Get your copy from Amazon or subscribe from the Index for Censorship.
THEY SAY 2011 IS THE YEAR OF THE SEQUEL (for a change), but luckily for filmgoers who want more that a retread there is a new venue for personal expression and a sense of mission.
The first Global Social Change Film Festival & Institute launches this April. The festival promotes social action filmmaking, and chose “Global Women and Film” for its inaugural theme. After its first run this year in Ubud, Bali, the festival moves on to other host cities (like New Orleans in 2012).
The festival will also honor activists and award a main prize to the film that best explores a contemporary social issue.
Watch trailers for the eight nominated films below. More info about GSCFFI.
1. Climate Refugees (Various): How extreme weather events and climate change are causing a global migration of climate refugees:
2. Deep Down (U.S.): Two friends end up on opposites sides of a debate when a proposed mountain-top coal mine comes to their community:
3. Fambul Tok (Sierra Leone): about grassroots reconciliation between the perpetrators and victims of the country’s civil war:
4. In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (U.S./Korea): a Korean adoptee who came to the US in 1966 searches for her real identity:
5. Nothing Rhymes with Ngaparjti (Australia): A Pitjantjatjara actor, Trevor Jamieson, returns to his traditional country to perform a hit theatre show to an all-Indigenous audience for the first time:
6. There Once Was an Island (South Pacific): Three residents of the Polynesian community of Takuu survive a tidal flood, but continuing climate change may force them from their homes:
7. A Village Called Versailles (U.S.): A community in New Orleans East try to rebuild their homes after Hurricane Katrina, but the city instead plans a debris disposal landfill in their community:
8. Dog Sweat (Iran): follows the lives of six young people in Tehran. Watch a clip here.
HE STANDS ON A BUSY THOROUGHFARE, UNNOTICED, a young man surrounded by people but alone.
He’s one of the subjects of an award-winning photography project, “The Silence of Others,” by London-based photographer Bharat Choudhary.
The portfolio documents young Muslims in a post 9-11 and 7-7 world, which for many is a world defined by social alienation, racial profiling, and negative perceptions.
The work in “Silence of Others” looks mostly at young people in Illinois, with a few portraits also taken in the U.K. Most are contemplative scenes, capturing private, introspective moments, drawing the viewer into the subject’s thoughts and emotions.
Choudhary, who is not Muslim, undertook the project to “understand the psychosocial experiences of a community.”
MARCH 10 MARKS THE FIFTY-SECOND ANNIVERSARY of the 1959 Tibetan National Uprising, when thousands of Tibetans gathered at the Norbulingka Palace, the Dalai Lama’s summer residence, to demand that Chinese troops leave Tibet. Over the next few days, the Chinese violently cracked down on protestors. At the end of that week, the Dalai Lama made his escape to Dharamsala, India, where he established the Tibetan government in exile.
Sixty years of occupation did not dull the spirit of resistance. Three years ago in March, Tibet once again rose up in protest.
Since 1959, the Tibetan people have struggled to keep their cultural and religious identity intact, and fought simply to stay alive.
Today, a fearful China acts preemptively to stop any possibility of protests inspired by the events in the Middle East. China is harassing journalists and this week closed Tibet to foreign tourists.
The popular uprisings in the Middle East inspired all of us who still believe in freedom of speech, religion, and assembly. Many of us rallied behind the citizens of Egypt, Tunisia, and Bahrain as they called for democratic freedom. The Tibetan people deserve that same kind of support.
Here is a short video about the uprising. More about Tibet here and here.
