Bringing the World Together Through Film

Every once in a while we come across something that truly inspires us.

With the digital world as it is, we could spend hours exploring mindless entertainment and superficial interaction via the web. Many of us do.

We’re connected and accessible in ways that we have never been before.

This ability to connect in real time to people with shared values across our communities, our countries, and the globe, around a common platform of interests, is truly compelling. It can be frustrating too. Those of us who take a while to formulate our thoughts and feelings in some ways are viewed as taking too long to make those feelings heard. “Internet time” is immediate, and often, as a result, vacuous.

Ane Garbin, a friend and fellow BLUR from Los Angeles, recently drew my attention to Pangea Day, an organization with a mission to bridge our differences and create understanding through film.

“In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it’s easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that — to help people see themselves in others — through the power of film.”

If you visit the Pangea Day website you’ll get a sense of a meaningful use of digital media to truly bring the world together.

Pangea Day is the product of a passionate desire by its founder, Jehane Noujaim, to help people bridge their differences and create understanding by sharing unique stories and perspectives through film.

Noujaim, an award-winning documentary film maker herself (Control Room - 2004, Startup.com - 2001), used a grant award from TED (Technology Entertainment Design) to bring Pangea Day, the tangible realization of her wish for “world peace”, to fruition. TED’s mission is to “Leverage the power of ideas to change the world” creating “ideas worth spreading”.

Noujaim’s idea was to create a day which brings the world together through film.

As she made her “wish” to the TED Conference, she told the audience that she sees film “as a way to build bridges, to learn each other’s dance moves.”

Perhaps Noujaim’s interest in connecting the world is an off-shoot of her upbringing. She is Egyptian-American, the daughter of an American mother and an Egyptian-Lebanese-Syrian father. She was raised in Cairo, but moved to the U.S. during High School, finally receiving her degree in Philosophy and Visual Arts from Harvard.

If we have an appreciation for another person’s humanity, they will have an appreciation for ours.

The first Pangea Day was held on May 10 of this year, simulcast digitally in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro as a program with film, live music, and world-class speakers. The entire event was also broadcast — in seven languages — to millions via the internet, television, and mobile phones.

Noujaim has the unique ability as a filmmaker to stand back and capture others telling their compelling stories. This is a trademark of her work, some of which you will be exposed to if you visit the Pangea Day site.

Among the 51 short films made by a truly international group of filmmakers (they can all be viewed at pangeaday.org), you’ll see two of her submissions, Combatants For Peace, and Mutual Recognition, both of which speak instantly to her ability as a visual storyteller. There are also 22 films which were featured at the Pangea Day event, and five award winners.

One of the most engaging award-winning entries is called I Remember Lebanon, a moving personal reflection by a young filmmaker named Zeina Aboul Hosn.

All of these films are moving in different ways….and worth whiling away some meaningful moments in front of your computer screen. They explore the human condition from distinct perspectives, but with the end of showing that, despite the distance between us culturally and geographically, we’re not so different after all.

From a very personal place, many of these stories resonated immediately with me making that visceral connection between the joy and excitement I feel in my own life when I have the opportunity to gain unique insight and understanding of other cultures, and the stories being told on the screen.

As Noujaim has so eloquently offered, “If we have an appreciation for another person’s humanity, they will have an appreciation for ours.”

Home Page Photograph: Sundance Channel Website. Body photos: Joshua Kessler 02138 Magazine, Pangea Day Website.