The United Nations Association Monterey Bay Chapter is one of the largest UNA chapters in the country: The all-volunteer foreign policy organization counts 400 local members.
It also proves to be one of the most active UNA chapters in the country. One current project involves fundraising to provide the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) money and resources to address the Syrian refugee crisis.
A major annual event feeds into that level of activity: their annual International Documentary Film Festival, which comes back around again this Friday and Saturday, Nov. 13-14 at its usual roost, the Golden State Theatre.
Members spent six months sifting through documentary selections and curating them down to the eight – from as short as 8-minute films to full-length features – that make up their 16th annual festival.
It’s worth spending time in the company of other consciousness-seeking theatergoers with these films; they are designed, organizers say, to “wake up, educate and sometimes mobilize viewers around critical issues.”
They tell us stories from faraway countries like Kenya, India and Afghanistan.
A Goat for a Vote, by Jeroen van Velzen, who won Best New Director at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival, follows the student class president election campaigns of three students in a school in Kenya.
One of the kids says he must wear glasses in order to look presidential. One kid offers a goat for a feast to his classmates if they elect him. Someone tells one of the students that she must lie.
It looks like a precocious and light-hearted glimpse into a moment in young Kenyan life. But the dynamics of this faraway school election look more and more familiar to American eyes and psyches being bombarded now with presidential campaign machinery.
Landfill Harmonic, the longest film at 84 minutes, begins in the city dump of Cateura near Asuncion, Paraguay, where local residents rifle through trash to scavenge out a desperate living. It is here that Cola, a “genius of the slum,” and musician Favio Chavez begin to make instruments out of the detritus for the local kids, who they band together into an ad-hoc orchestra they call the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura, whose act of pride and musicianship sweeps them up onto world stages.
The story revolves around kids, music and Paraguay, but it also advocates for looking past class and privilege, and seeing and valuing musical talent – and, by relation, all kinds of talents – in kids, and helping them use that talent to lift themselves up.
These stories stand, in many ways, as the antithesis of the news product churned out by CNN or Fox News. To Kill A Sparrow reveals more about Afghan culture, law and family life in 26 minutes than 10 times as much time spent spinning through the typically overheated cable news cycle.
A young woman, Soheila, is imprisoned in a Kabul women’s prison not for murder or drug dealing, but for love. Literally.
When she was 5, she was betrothed by her father to a man his own age. Soheila’s brother stole that man’s wife, and so Soheila was promised to him in order to correct the transgression.
They call it “baad,” the exchange of Afghan girls.
But when she came of age and was duped into marrying the man, Soheila instead fell in love with another man, her own age, who also loved her. She ran away with him and they had a baby.
When her family discovered her predicament, they sent her to the authorities to imprison her.
Her son was born in prison. Her lover, who could not bear for her to be locked up and himself free, turned himself in; the authorities sentence him to 6 years.
Photojournalist and documentary filmmaker Zohreh Soleimani, from Iran, with support from the Center for Investigative Reporting, follows this story of young persecuted love against a backdrop of a country grappling with modernity and change, and a people deeply damaged by war.
Soheila’s brother (who committed the original sin) has a daughter; he betrothed her when she was 3 days old. When Soleimani asks him what he would do if she fled her arranged marriage, he makes the hand gesture of pulling a trigger.
“We are not afraid of dying, we are not afraid of beating, we are not afraid of killing. For us, it’s like killing a sparrow.”
Not a single shot fired, but there it is: the aftermath of the brutality of war, cascading down and out and tearing through generations of a family.
These films – some heavy, some lighter, all enlightening – deserve attention. They are voyages that bring faraway countries and cultures closer to us.
They are mirrors, all of them, of our own humanity.
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