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DEVELOPMENT
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Children
of Conflict
(English / 25 min.)
Country
: UK
Production
Co. : WTN
Producer
: Jennifer Wilson
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Among
the unacceptable faces of modern warfare is the
involvement - and sometimes deliberate brutalization -
of children. WTN's CHILDREN OF CONFLICT features four
stories showing how children are affected by war and
new initiatives to help rehabilitate them. BOY
SOLDIERS examines the war-scarred victims of
Mozambique’s 15-year civil war, NEW GAMES FOR THE
STONE THROWERS explores how children in the Gaza Strip
who once formed the front-line of the Intifada - the
Palestinian uprising - are now finally receiving an
education. PLAYING WITH FIRE focuses on the thousands
of children who have lost limbs, been blinded or lost
their families as a result of landmines, and SARAJEVO
SURVIVORS features the work of the International
Children’s Institute in Montreal which rehabilitates
children from Bosnia and other areas of conflict.
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Spoils
of War
(English / 53 min.)
Country
: UK
Production
Co. : Central Television
Producer/Director
: Toni Strasburg
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Fifteen
years of violent civil war in Mozambique have left a
grim legacy - three million refugees, widespread
habitat destruction, more than 50,000 elephants
slaughtered. SPOILS OF WAR investigates how the war
machines of both sides were financed at the expense of
the environment. Jan Brackenbart, a former South
African government official, describes the vital
supply line between South Africa and the right-wing
Renamo rebels: out went thousands of elephant tusks
through South African ports to lucrative ivory markets
in the Far East; in came South African weapons to arm
the rebels. With the end of the war, there are plans
to revive the tourist industry with a new ‘peace’
park straddling the frontier. But will it take account
of the needs of local people?
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Living
with Disaster
(English, French, Bengali,
Shona, Tagalog / 26 min.
[or 4 x 10 new
features])
Country : UK
Production
Co. : TVE in
association with Intermediate Technology
Producer/Director
: Damien Rea
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Over
the past 20 years, four million of the world’s
people have been killed by droughts, floods,
earthquakes and hurricanes and close to half the
population of the planet has suffered some form of
disruption to their lives. LIVING WITH DISASTER casts
aside the familiar news headlines of misery and
destruction to present the untold story - how
relatively inexpensive investment can reap huge
rewards; reducing the cost, both in reconstruction and
in human suffering. In drought-prone Zimbabwe, farmers
have developed their own methods for coping in the
harshly arid conditions; while in the Philippines, the
programme looks at ways to prevent a typhoon becoming
a full-scale disaster. Featuring dramatic archive
footage, these and other stories from Latin America
and Bangladesh demonstrate how local communities can
bounce back from the turmoil of natural disasters.
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Five
Realities of the Future
(English / 42 min. )
Country
: UK
Production
Co. : TVE
Producer/Director
: Damien Rea
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The
five vignettes that make up Damien Rea’s film
together demonstrate the power of community action in
helping people take control of their own lives. In
Costa Rica, the Bribri people have fought a successful
battle to win back the ancestral lands wrested from
them by Spanish settlers. On the Japanese island of
Ishigaki, the villagers of Shiraho staged a campaign
to stop the government building an airport which would
destroy their priceless coral reef. In India, the
villagers of Dhanawas have built their own gas
generators to provide cheap energy. And in Hungary, a
local group on the outskirts of Budapest have set up a
community scheme to monitor, and clean up the heavy
metal contamination of the soil that is the legacy of
40 years of unregulated industrial development.
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Pulp
Future
(English / 45 min. )
Country
: UK
Production
Co. : BBC
Producer/Director
: Mark Dowd |
In
1994, Senator Tim Wirth of the US Department of Global
Affairs faxed an article from Atlantic Monthly to
every US embassy around the world. The article - The
Coming Anarchy by American journalist Robert
Kaplan - predicted societal break-down and growing
chaos worldwide, and so rattled top United Nations
officials that they called a confidential meeting to
discuss its implications. In this BBC Panorama
programme, reporter Steve Bradshaw tests Kaplan’s
ideas in locations in China, Rio de Janeiro and Sierra
Leone which can be seen as laboratories for the
future. But the rich, industrialised world is not
immune to chaos either, the film concludes: the social
conditions that give rise to civil breakdown in Sierra
Leone’s Freetown are also replicating themselves in
UK cities like Liverpool. |
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