"To Catch a Dollar" trailer

Here is the official trailer to the movie "To Catch a Dollar." The movie chronicles Grammen Bank's expansion and the introduction of microcredit in America. The movie was recently screened at the Sundance Film festival.

Film: "The Children Left Behind"

from The Silver Spring Voice

During civil war in the 80's many Salvadorian children were without their parents. This article talks about a film that profiles those children. - Kale

At first Leon Seltzer did not understand why the great majority of the Salvadoran women who shopped at his Adams Morgan discount clothing store in the late 1980’s were so unfamiliar with the sizes of their children’s apparel and why the children themselves never tagged along. Even when he asked the mothers to demonstrate the sizes with their hands – “How tall? How big around?”-- he was given vague and uncertain answers.

These were boys and girls, as he came to realize, destined to grow up in their home country while their mothers, in self-exile from dire poverty and a civil war, labored at immigrant jobs in the Washington area. The clothes purchased at Leon’s store, along with toiletries, cash and an occasional toy, were air-mailed home.

Leon, an immigrant himself, who had been born above a clothing store in Brazil and who had once been a Manhattan clothier, became friends with several of the Salvadoran women and learned something else they held close. In a few cases, over time, they had lost track of their children.

In 1991 Leon traveled to El Salvador as an emissary for them. A ceasefire was in the works, but the war was not over. “There were headless torsos on the roads, bombs going off in the hills,” he recalled on a recent afternoon at his current clothing store, Rerun, in Old Takoma. In the villages where the children had been left, often in the care of a grandmother, he inquired after them. The news was not always positive. “Some had run off. They had become delinquents, glue sniffers, thieves, prostitutes.” When he did locate missing children he handed over gifts from their moms, but the kids invariably asked if he was their ticket to the U. S., and he had to say he was there to reconnect them but not to reunite them. “They misinterpreted why I was there. It was heartbreaking.”

Aside from the gifts and an exchange of addresses, the reconnection took another form. Leon had brought along a movie camera, and he recorded his conversations with the children, their hard candor and tearful pleas, to show to their mothers back in Adams Morgan. From these across-the-border communications Leon ultimately produced a subtitled documentary, “The Children Left Behind,” that was seen on a national tour in 1994 and was screened again on November 18 at the community center during this year’s Takoma Park Film Festival.

For the film he conducted more than a thousand interviews, delving into the lives of many of the estimated 300,000 Salvadoran children separated by economic reality from their mother or father, or both. Yolanda Campos, one of the film’s protagonists, left behind her field-worker husband and their seven children. “They were going to take our house,” she says on camera in a voice that is at once deadpan and wrenching. “My husband said, ‘Let the bank take it.’ He said he would build us a shack somewhere. But I said, ‘How can I let them do that?’”

Link to full article. May expire in future.

The real cost of a café latte

From UC Berkeley written by Wendy Edelstein,

After oil, coffee is the second-most-actively traded commodity in the world market, yet many of the farmers who grow and depend on the crop for their survival live in poverty. In Ethiopia, 15 million coffee farmers can barely eke out a living, even though coffee constitutes 67 percent of the country's export revenue. Famine has become commonplace, with seven million Ethiopians requiring emergency food aid each year.

The statistics, though compelling, don't tell the story on their own. Filmmakers Marc and Nick Francis — whose 2006 documentary Black Gold screens on campus next Friday at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival — found an ideal protagonist in Tadesse Meskela, the soft-spoken manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union in southern Ethiopia, representing 74,000 coffee producers. Committed to seeing his farmers earn a living wage, Meskela travels internationally to find coffee roasters willing to pay more than the global exchange rate for his premium-grade coffee. Unfortunately, he is fighting an uphill battle.

Two billion cups of coffee are consumed daily, and annual retail sales have rocketed from $30 billion in 1990 to $80 billion in 2005. Skimming off most of the profits are four multinational organizations that dominate the global coffee market: Kraft, Nestle, Proctor & Gamble, and Sara Lee.

A fraction of those proceeds dribble into the figurative cups of the Ethiopian farmers, who pray for an increase in the price of coffee. Currently, they receive two birr (24 cents) for a kilo of beans. That figure hasn't risen since the 1989 collapse of the International Coffee Agreement, at which time the commodity's price dropped to a 30-year low.

Meskela tells his growers that a kilo of coffee yields about 80 cups. Western consumers pay 25 birr ($2.90) on average for their cups of joe, calculates Meskela, or $230 a kilo. Unable to feed their families, support local schools, or keep their children clothed, the farmers would be happy to receive the equivalent of 60 cents per kilo. That amount, says one farmer, would change their lives.

Ethiopia and beyond

The situation transcends the plight of the Ethiopian coffee farmers. Many producers in the developing world are unable to earn a stable income that would lift them out of poverty, says George Scharffenberger, executive director of Berkeley's Blum Center for Developing Economies, who will introduce Black Gold at its screening next week. He viewed the film last semester in a global-poverty survey course taught by Ananya Roy, associate professor and chair of urban studies in the Department of City and Regional Planning.

The film, says Scharffenberger, offered an opportunity to reinforce one of the course's themes — that of "the connection between all kinds of purchasing decisions, made at every level right down to the consumer, that have a very real impact on those at the far end of the production chain."

Greedy governments pose part of the problem, he explains, operating between the producers and international buyers as monopolistic middlemen, funneling surplus funds back into their own coffers. "Everyone along the chain is using whatever power they have to get their piece of the pie. Unfortunately, from a power point of view, those at the base have the least, and they get the crumbs."

Unlike oil, a commodity in limited supply sourced primarily in the Middle East, coffee's producers are spread out and diversified. Coffee also lacks a cartel that can threaten disruptions. For these reasons, Scharffenberger doubts that the cost of coffee alone will bring the situation of producers like Meskela's farmers into consumers' consciousness.

"Consumers need to be educated about what they're buying, what their choices are, and the implications of those choices," he explains. As Americans have become more discriminating when purchasing food, some consumers are opting for locally grown, organic options. With coffee, says Scharffenberger, "One can imagine that some of the fair-trade issues could also be brought into that complex decision-making, so it's not just a question of the lowest price or the best quality but of shopping for products that have a dimension of better health, more environmental aspects, and certainly fairness in terms of peoples around the world."

New film highlights global injustice impacting Africa

from Ekklesia

International development agency Christian Aid and leading British Muslim magazine, Q-News, have teamed up to host a special screening of Bamako, a powerful film about the devastating effects of World Bank and IMF policies imposed on African countries, at the Curzon Cinema, Mayfair, London on 12 February 2007.

The film is being shown around the country. Bamako won critical acclaim when it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2006. Set in Mali, which is 90 per cent Muslim, but representing all of African society, the film puts the World Bank, IMF and WTO on trial.

One by one ordinary Africans – an unemployed teacher, a farmer and a fabric dyer – voice their anger at the disastrous policies which have led to increased debt, unfair trade rules and privatisation across the continent.

A mock court, filmed in the director Abderrahmane Sissako’s own father’s courtyard in Bamako, provides the setting. It is where Sissako grew up with his extended family and where he remembers the passionate discussions with his father about Africa.

"This film expresses the anger and frustration many African people rightly feel towards international bodies like the IMF and World Bank," said Dionne Gravesande head of church networks at Christian Aid.

She continued: "It delves into the reasons why the continent is facing such huge economic problems and it’s a film everyone who wants to know more about Africa’s struggle should see. Bamako definitely pushes the boundaries of debate – in this case, the relationships between powerful rich nations and the developing world."

Q-News editor Fareena Alam said: "Unscripted, raw, utterly human – Bamako takes on the policies of World Bank and the IMF with clarity and emotional punch."

"It’s a powerful statement from Africa's people about the ravaging effects of globalisation and international debt, the privatisation of their natural resources such as water and the ‘war on terror’ fear-mongering that is used as an excuse for world domination.

"[The film] is a call to action that cannot be ignored. We are proud to stand with Christian Aid in making sure the greatest number of people see this film and are compelled to act."

After the screening Charles Abugre, Christian Aid’s head of policy, will be joined by Malian director Abderrahmane Sissako and actor Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon and Dream Girls) who makes a special appearance in the film, for an open debate on the issues raised by the film. The discussion will be chaired by actress Adjoa Andoh (Casualty and Dr Who).

The debate will continue online through the Bamako Petition calling upon Chancellor Gordon Brown and Hilary Benn, the Secretary of State for International Development, to push for fundamental reform of the IMF and World Bank.

It will be delivered to the IMF and World Bank meeting in Washington DC in April 2007. The release of the film follows lobbying by campaigners in September 2006 who called on the UK government to stop paying for poverty and cut funding to the IMF and World Bank until they reform.

UK development secretary Hilary Benn responded by holding back £50 million of the UK's contribution of £1.3 bilion over the period 2005/08, triggering significant political and media debate in Autumn 2006.

Bamako goes on general release in the UK on 23 February 2007. Regional screenings events will be at:

• Glasgow Film Theatre, Wed 7 March
• Manchester Cornerhouse, Friday 9 March
• ‘The Drum’ Birmingham, Friday 16 February
• FACT Liverpool, Monday 19 March

A full listing of all preview screenings can be seen on www.bamako-themovie.com