Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Pangea Day

I've been attending TED vicariously and one  of the most inspiring ideas put forward is Pangea Day

From the TED blog

Actress Goldie Hawn is one of the many public figures around the world supporting Pangea Day, a project that was voiced as a "wish" by 2006 TED Prize winner Jehane Noujaim, when she wondered if it would be possible to create a "day when you have everyone coming together from around the world and sharing a communal experience of watching a film all together, all at the same time, from Times Square to Ramallah to the side of the Great Wall of China". That day is going to happen, on May 10, when four hours of programming -- films, user-generated videos, speakers, music, hosted by CNN's Christiane Amanpour -- will take place in several locations and broadcast by TV channels, shown on theatres, distributed over cell phones, streamed online, screened in village places and private homes all over the world. That's Pangea Day. Movies alone can't change the world: but the people who watch them can. "We will see sameness and not the differences", Goldie Hawn says. The Pangea Day website is here, with informations on hosting an event or finding one to attend, backgrounders, etc. The event will be globally supported by Nokia. (A side note: the picture on the Pangea Day homepage shows one of the greatest annual moments of cinematic communion in the world: the evening screenings on the Piazza Grande at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, where up to 10'000 people gather to watch movies under the summer sky).

PangeaDay is an invitation to see things differently, to consider also the other's point of view. Here is an example, a video that's been produced for PangeaDay, based on the images of the famous scene of the unarmed young man carrying shopping bags who stood in front of the tanks on Tienanmen Square, on 5 June 1989, blocking them. The young man has remained anonymous. So did the soldier driving the tank.



1 comment:

Unknown said...

I hate to be a downer but it is my understanding that soldiers found this guy not long after this and shot him in an alleyway out of site.