December 10th at 6pm Cowin Center, Teachers College 525 W. 120th St
About three years ago after a long career in television I thought that I should/could write a treatment for a film about why poverty persists in a world where there is so much wealth.
So I did... and the people at Cinema Libre Studios liked it right off the bat. The film got funding and fairly quickly I was working on my first film as a co-producer! Over the span of the process the original idea, thankfully, got developed further and new threadlines were seen and woven through by the director.
read on for the cliffhanger to resolve!
The film is called "The End of Poverty?" Its title hints at its theme: that the measures which have been proposed by some westerners, while well intentioned, do not attack the structures that underlie much of the world's poverty, and thus may ameliorate some of the effects of poverty, but not come close to touching poverty's major causes. This film provides both broad directions for reform and a new framework for thinking about the origins of poverty.
The film seeks to discover the reason that poverty persists in a world with so much wealth. The End of Poverty? traveled around Africa and South America to offer a new framework around the pressing issue of global poverty. Participants in the film include Nobel Prize winners Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, John Perkins (Confessions of an Economic Hitman), Chalmers Johnson, and Susan George (TransNational Foundation)and our very own Jerome a Paris!
amazingly our feature length documentary got into the Cannes Film Festival this year and was acknowledged as "An Official Selection of Critics Week"! This is sort of crazy since Cannes barely shows documentaries let alone acknowledges them.
Here is me and my wife in Cannes...
Reuters correspondent Charles Masters called it "An Inconvenient Truth" for global economics"
Anyway, the film is coming out in March/April 2009 ...in the meanwhile it is doing well in the film festival circuit. That is where you come in.
December 10th at 6 pm it is showing at the African Diaspora Film Festival at the Cowin Center, Teachers College 525 W. 120th St.
There will also be a panel discussion at the end:
Panelists include - Director and founder of Cinema Libre Studio, Philippe Diaz, investigative journalist Arun Gupta (The Indypendent), sociologist and author, William DiFazio ("Ordinary Poverty"), co-producer Matthew Stillman (Robert Schalkenbach Foundation), Vincente Garcia-Delgado, CIVICUS UN Representative (NY) and actor/author and activist Brian Jones.
Come and see it...blog about it, talk to me as on the panel discussion afterwards!
hope to see you there. tell your friends!