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Rites
of Passage: Four Stories of Survival
( English / 24
min. )
Country : USA
Production Co. : Kinross Films Inc
Producer/Director : Diane Best |
Diane Best’s award-winning film tells the
stories of four
teenage girls coming-of-age in four very different
communities - and the personal cost of this transition to
adulthood for each of them. In the pressurised
environment of shanty-town life in Nicaragua, Aleuda is
addicted to glue-sniffing and is gradually slipping into a
life of prostitution. In India, Tarranum - like so many girl
children - has already been taken out of full-time
education and is waiting to be married off by her
parents. In Jamaica, Natalyn is 14 years old and seven
months pregnant. While finally in Burkina Faso, Adjara
faces the prospect of female genital mutilation - a tradition
that the local women see as essential if women are to
enter into married life.
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Hanan Ashrawi - A Woman of her Time
( English, Spanish, French / 52 min. )
Country : Palestine
Production Co. : Nour Productions, TVE
Producer/Director : Mai Masri
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In the stormy aftermath of the Israeli-PLO peace
accord,
former Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi
emerged as a powerful and outspoken stateswoman. A
47-year-old mother of two, and a central figure in the
Middle East peace process, Ashrawi twice turned down
the job of Minister of Information in the newly-appointed
Palestinian administration because she feared it would
become a censorship department. Instead, she founded
the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizen’s
Rights whose goal is to put civil liberties on the
Palestinian agenda. Mai Masri’s film explores Ashrawi’s
early family life, her first encounters with the PLO and
her struggle to reconcile her public life with her role as
wife and mother - in a region where democracy has so
far had little impact on the status of women.
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