UNITED NATIONS - / MaximsNews Network / 09 October 2008 --  Listen to Ban Ki-moon: “In women the world has the most significant but untapped potential for development and peace.”  

Listen to Stephen Lewis, former United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS: “I challenge you to enter the fray against gender inequality.  There is no more honorable or productive calling.  There is nothing of greater import in the world.  All roads lead from women to social change.”  

In my book “34 Million Friends of the Women of the World” published in 2005, I write: “Linda and I have recently discussed doing a major motion picture documentary about what reproductive health care is all about and emphasizing the need for worldwide grassroots support for the women and girls of the world.”  

Linda is Linda Harrar, Boston based award winning executive producer, director, writer for PBS. Please see www.lindaharrarproductions.com . Linda is the real deal. I met her at a United Nations Population Fund reception in the lobby of the United Nations in 2002.  Earlier in 2002, I had co-founded 34 Million Friends of the United Nations Population Fund where we asked (and still do) 34 million Americans for a dollar to make up for the $34 million President Bush had withheld that year. See: www.34millionfriends.org.  

On the book’s first page I write: “My ultimate goal is a worldwide grassroots movement dedicated to ensuring the full humanity and individual rights of women and girls. This is too important an issue to leave to governments alone. The outcome will affect us all.  We all must do our part.  It’s time to take a stand.”  

The catalyst for my getting really serious about this documentary idea was an article in the Los Angeles Times on Valentine’s Day 2007 that talked about “filmanthropists,” people with money who wanted to change the world through film.  

Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” was of course prominently featured. In many ways that film put climate change on the world’s agenda because hundreds of millions of people saw ice crashing into the sea. THE POWER OF FILM!  

So, on Valentine’s Day 2007, I wrote a “concept” paper about how I thought a film could put all the pieces of the gender inequality puzzle together and indeed effect a worldwide change of consciousness.  

I sent it to Linda and to Allan Rosenfield, then Dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and a worldwide icon in the field of women’s reproductive health.  His 1985 article “Where is the M in MCH?” (Where is the maternal in the field of maternal and child health?) changed the world’s thinking. Somehow the mothers had been forgotten. How can you really take care of children without taking care of their mothers?  

I had not met Allan personally but knew that he knew about 34 Million Friends. Tears came to my eyes when I saw his four word email to me about the film. “THIS MUST BE DONE.”  

Being a great believer in serendipity, I was not surprised that Allan and Linda had worked together on several projects and had great respect for one another. Linda’s two proposals to the Packard Foundation for planning and outreach for our film have been granted. The Stories Women Tell is to be the title.  

From the proposal’s first page:  

“The film will consist of a dozen “story vignettes” six to nine minutes long, each quite creatively distinct from all of the others – like a dozen polished gems strung together on a necklace. Rather than choosing just one, two or three stories about gender inequality that might be dismissed as anecdotal or locked in one culture, we will embrace the diversity of the issues, as well as the diverse geography of women’s lives.  Taken together, the stories will create a powerful global portrait of the unique challenges women face, as well as the inspiring women and men dedicated to solving them.  From maternal mortality to domestic violence, from lack of access to education, economic power, and reproductive health care, these story vignettes will reveal the life-threatening consequences of gender inequality and lack of human rights.  The experience of watching the film will point the way toward a new vision of what a world with true gender equality might mean for people and the planet, and for a more peaceful, stable future.”  

If you have seen the movie “Paris, Je t’Aime” you will remember that several different directors had gone to different geographical locations around Paris and filmed short powerful stories.  

Linda and I, again serendipitously, saw that film during the same week and wrote each other that this should be the model for our film. Through her Filmmakers Collaborative and with top notch outside directors, Linda is poised to send to all corners of the globe award winning filmmaker-directors to record and film the stories women tell.   

From the proposal’s page 3:  

“Through the portraits of The Stories Women Tell, the human potential addressed in the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development’s Programme of Action and later in the Millennium Development Goals will come alive.  These highly personal stories will be produced by a small but diverse group of creative, award-winning filmmakers.   

The stories will be beautifully photographed in High Definition video, and accompanied by a rich and varied musical score that will evoke each international location.  Music and song in the film will not compete with the stories, but will enable dramatic moments to soar, with choral voices and call-and-response.  

Viewed together in a theater setting, the sum of the stories will be far greater than the parts with the goal to prime the audience for action and engagement, armed with new ideas to fight for equality for girls and women.  In short, we envision a film that will launch an international discussion of gender inequality and motivate activism and change.”  

This film will also confront squarely the issue of population growth. With over 9 billion people on the planet by 2050 -- all seeking food, water, energy and other resources, the world will face difficult challenges. Frankly, the United Nations may become little more than a crisis response and crisis management body. Things could get ugly.    

Last October, at the Women Deliver conference in London convened to highlight maternal mortality worldwide, Dr Grace Kodindo, a physician from Chad, presented a film by the BBC entitled Dead Mums Don’t Cry.  

The BBC had spent one week filming at her reproductive health care clinic in Chad and in one week several birthing mothers died of hemorrhage and eclampsia and a 12 year old girl arrived with a raging infection from an abortion to which she succumbed.  When the BBC showed this film in Great Britain and Chad, things changed rapidly for this clinic with money and supplies. THE POWER OF FILM!  

When Oprah Winfrey invited Dr. Catherine Hamlin, founder of the Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia to be on her program and when the film A WALK TO BEAUTIFUL by Engel Entertainment, which tells stories about women cured of fistulas at this same hospital, was presented on PBS and on other outlets, the hospital received a sea of donations.  THE POWER OF FILM!  

Film is the most powerful medium for effecting change.  

The fact that women represent two thirds of the world’s most impoverished people, that there are millions of cases of sex selective abortion and female infanticide, that boys are favored in the distribution of food where there is not enough to go around, that women lack inheritance and other legal rights, that two thirds of the illiterate people on the planet are women, that the numbers of cases of maternal mortality (deaths in childbirth) are not falling, that 200 million women lack access to family planning, that AIDS is taking on a woman’s face, that over 40 million abortions are sought every year because of a lack of information, of health care workers, and of family planning commodities, that young girls are married off against their will and desires, that women and girls are trafficked for sex and labor due to poverty and illiteracy, that systematic violence against women is seldom punished,  that the UN has paid huge lip service to gender of late but has taken few concrete steps --  all this points to the absolute need for a truly inspiring consciousness changing film.  

Needed:  A visionary! Someone wanting to leave an indelible mark on the planet! Someone who frankly sees the possibilities for substantive changes that our film could elicit. Someone who understands the price the world is paying for gender inequality and what true gender equality might mean. We need $3 million!  

Allan Rosenfield: “It is not enough to know for the sake of knowing. We have the responsibility to act on what we know. Acting on knowledge is an imperative. And that imperative we can truly delight in.”  

Is there a “FILMANTHROPIST” out there?

Labels:   Filmanthropist, Jane Roberts, 34 Million Friends, Allan Rosenfield, Grace Kodindo, Catherine Hamlin, Stephen Lewis, Linda Harrar, The Stories Women Tell, UNFPA, United Nations Population Fund, Maternal mortality, abortion, family planning, Millennium Development Goals, Gender inequality, Lois Abraham, Women Deliver, $34 million, 34millionfriends, video, YouTube, MaximsNewsNetwork, United Nations, U.N.,

 

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