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Five Realities of the Future
( English / 42 min. )
Country : UK
Production Co. : TVE
Producer/Director : Damien Rea
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The five vignettes that make up Damien Rea’s film
together demonstrate the power of community action in
helping people take
control of their own lives. In Costa
Rica, the Bribri people have fought a
successful battle to
win back the ancestral lands wrested from them by
Spanish settlers. On the Japanese island of Ishigaki, the
villagers of
Shiraho staged a campaign to stop the
government building an airport which
would destroy
their priceless coral reef. In India, the villagers of
Dhanawas have built their own gas generators to
provide cheap energy. And in
Hungary, a local group
on the outskirts of Budapest have set up a community
scheme to monitor, and clean up the heavy metal
contamination of the soil
that is the legacy of 40 years of
unregulated industrial development.
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Pulp Future
( English / 45 min. )
Country : UK
Production Co. : BBC
Producer/Director : Mark Dowd
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In 1994, Senator Tim Wirth of the US Department of
Global Affairs faxed an article from Atlantic Monthly to
every US embassy around the
world. The article - The
Coming Anarchy by American journalist Robert
Kaplan
- predicted societal break-down and growing chaos
worldwide, and so
rattled top United Nations officials that
they called a confidential meeting
to discuss its
implications. In this BBC Panorama programme,
reporter Steve
Bradshaw tests Kaplan’s ideas in
locations in China, Rio de Janeiro and
Sierra Leone
which can be seen as laboratories for the future. But the
rich,
industrialised world is not immune to chaos either,
the film concludes: the
social conditions that give rise to
civil breakdown in Sierra Leone’s
Freetown are also
replicating themselves in UK cities like Liverpool.
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