Films of Note for 2008 - With Corless Content!

For this holiday season, check out these two movies that feature yours truly:

• Three Cups of Tea for Global Understanding won 2nd place in the Mountain View Reads contest. This 10 minute film explains how the Global Understanding Institute was a directly causal result of reading Three Cups of Tea, the New York Times bestseller by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. My thanks for all our viewers and supporters! This film will be shown on Mountain View Cable (KMVT15).
  


• The Rehearsal, was a finalist for the Campus MovieFest (CMF) Western Regional Finals, under the category for the Elfenworks Social Justice award. We attended the screening at the Sundance Kibuki and the Grand Finale this past Sunday, and were able to speak for a few minutes about how and why we made the film, and what will come next. Congratulations and thank you to Franklin Pham, Harshi Lanjewar, Zaur Hasanov, all the narrators, artists of sound and visual images, and to everyone who, in five minutes, made the impossible possible!

While neither picture won top prize in its category, both were well-received and made it part-way up the hill of public recognition. These were the first formal films for both of us. While I had made a student video back in Beach Channel High School, shot a short movie at Carnegie Mellon as an undergrad, and did a podcast before for the Global Understanding Institute, this was the first time we had both entered a film contest for the public consideration of our work as an inspiration to social movement.

Both Franklin and I are now strategizing about the next films to lens and prizes to shoot for. How many frames per how many minutes and seconds, targeting our messages and our memes, our scripts and our themes.

Franklin is still working on a longer 20-30 minute interview-style movie, The American Dream. I am cooking up plans to do some documentary-style works on Armistice Day and the backgrounder video for the Global Understanding Movement and the Global Understanding Institute. There's also some video I'd like to do for 10 December 2008, the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).


Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)

60th Anniversary Celebration - 10 December 2008 (United Nations)

For now, to get involved with celebrating the 60th Anniversary UDHR, see the United Nations’ own site for the event, join the Every Human Has Rights campaign and check out the Small Places Tour for Amnesty International.