The Prague Post
October 12th, 2008
Endowment Fund     Business Listings ONLINE      Reservations      Classifieds    Subscriptions
Hotel Prague Centre
Prague Real Estate

Home » Archives » Tempo

Global warning

One World Film Festival offers English-language viewers a provocative look at world affairs

By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 28th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Scenes from harrowing and controversial moments in The Road to Guantanamo, top, and Invasion and Jesus Camp, top and bottom below.
The annual One World Film documentary festival could be best described as a Karlovy Vary of nonfiction. In its ninth year, the festival again presents a full pantry of documentaries (120 this year) from around the world.
There are mini-festivals within the larger festival, so if you’re interested in what’s happening in Africa, Asia, South America or even here in the Czech lands, One World can offer you a good grounding.
The One World Film Festival (Jeden svět)

When: Feb. 28-March 8
Where: Lucerna, Světozor, Perštýn, Evald and Ponrepo
Tickets: 70 Kč, available at the venues
For a complete schedule, check www.oneworld.cz

Among this year’s leading films, the focus naturally falls on the most pressing political issues of the day, primarily the Middle East and the environment. In the latter category, two films are particularly worth seeking out, as they offer grim bookends to the epic U.S. disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan: Michael Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo and Rory Kennedy’s Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. Both titles are self-explanatory, and both Winterbottom and Kennedy offer a searing indictment of the United States’ war crimes. (Guantanamo plays March 1 at 9:30 p.m. at Světozor and March 7 at 5:30 p.m. at Lucerna. Ghosts screens March 4 at 9:30 p.m. at Lucerna, and again March 5 p.m. at Perštýn.)
Is there any hope for the Middle East? Israel’s Bridge Over the Wadi by Barak and Tomer Heyman looks at a bilingual elementary school set up by Israeli and Palestinian parents that is trying to make a difference (March 3 at 7:30 p.m. at Lucerna). However, back in God’s country, directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady have captured the future triumph of the will for evangelicals in the Oscar-nominated Jesus Camp (March 2 at 9:30 p.m. at Světozor, and March 5 at 5 p.m. at Perštýn). In case anyone needs further reminder of American religious fervor, there’s Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple (March 3 at 3:30 p.m. at Lucerna, and March 6 at 7:30 p.m. at Lucerna).
Following in the footsteps of the Oscar-winning documentary, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, is Tom Jackson’s Out of Balance: ExxonMobil’s Impact on Climate Change. While many oil companies have begrudgingly come to admit their part in global warming, ExxonMobil has done everything in its power to disparage scientific findings. Jackson takes on this behemoth among big oil barons, and brings famed environmental writer Bill McKibben into the argument. (March 2 at 5:30 p.m. at Lucerna, and March 5 at 5:30 p.m. at the Municipal Library).
Among an impressive batch of new films, One World is also screening important British docu-dramas from the past (all screened at Ponrepo), two of which are concerned with Czech history.
The oldest film is Humphrey Jennings’ breathtakingly bold The Silent Village from 1943. Jennings, a leader of British surrealism, became an important filmmaker — one whom Lindsay Anderson called “the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced.” To communicate the butchery committed by the Nazis against the Czech village of Lidice, Jennings re-imagined the outrage by supposing that the Germans had arrived in a small Welsh mining village.
Using only Welsh townspeople as his actors, Jennings managed to produce one of the most moving and haunting pieces of anti-fascist propaganda from World War II, while blurring the lines between fiction and documentary that would inspire many British filmmakers to come, such as Leslie Woodhead, whose film Invasion from 1980 takes on the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. (The Silent Village plays March 1 at 9 p.m. and March 3 at 4:30 p.m., while Invasion screens March 5 at 6:30 p.m. and again March 8 at 4:30 p.m.)
Two other important docu-dramas from the United Kingdom are Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home (1966) and Antony Thomas’ The Death of a Princess (1980). Placing second on the BFI’s “100 Greatest British Television Programs of the 20th Century,” Loach’s film, detailing the lack of proper social care for the destitute in Britain, shocked a nation into action.
Another nation, Saudi Arabia, was shocked into moral inaction when Thomas’ The Death of a Princess was screened in the United Kingdom. Detailing the brutal execution of a young woman of the royal house of Saud, who was guilty of having fallen in love with a man, the film put the repressive oil regime on the defensive. It had only a limited showing in the United States on PBS (many stations with Saudi or oil connections opted out of broadcasting it), while it was never again televised in the United Kingdom. (Cathy Come Home screens March 8 at 6:30 p.m., while Princess can be seen March 3 at 6:30.)

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Tempo (28/02/2007):

Browse the Current Issue

If you enjoyed this article, why don't you subscribe to the print version!
We accept secure online transactions provided by PayPal and Moneybookers

Be the first to add a comment!


Full Name: *
City: *
E-mail: **
This comment can be published in the print version of The Prague Post
Enter the text on the right:
 visual captcha
Comment: *
* Required field. In order to be approved for display, comments must have a first and last name and a city.
** E-mails are required and will only be used for internal purposes.

Most visited in Business Listings

Hotel booking
The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in
The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
To subscribe to the print paper, click here.
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.