Following the enthusiastic response to the World Community Film Festival, organizers are scheduling at least two Best of Fest screenings to give Valley residents an opportunity to see  some of the most popular films screened last weekend.

The first of these screenings will be the feature-length documentary Schooling the World: the White Man’s Last Burden, which will be shown in the theatre at North Island College on Feb. 15 at 7 p.m.

Today, volunteers build schools in traditional societies around the world, convinced that school is the only way to a ‘better’ life for indigenous children.

But is this true? What really happens when we replace a traditional culture’s way of learning and understanding the world with our own?

Beautifully shot on location in the Buddhist culture of Ladakh in the northern Indian Himalayas, the film weaves the voices of Ladakhi people through a conversation between four carefully chosen original thinkers.

They are anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis, a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence; Helena Norberg-Hodge and Vandana Shiva, both recipients of the Right Livelihood Award for their work with traditional peoples in India; and Manish Jain, a former architect of education programs with UNESCO, USAID, and the World Bank.

Schooling the World questions our very definitions of wealth and poverty — and of knowledge and ignorance — as it uncovers the role of schools in the destruction of traditional sustainable agricultural and ecological knowledge, in the breakup of extended families and communities, and in the devaluation of elders and ancient spiritual traditions.

Details of a second Best of Fest screening featuring the food issues film Fresh in partnership  with the North Island College Global Learning Initiative will be released next week. Admission will be by donation. 
For more information, including film trailers and other features, go to http://schoolingtheworld.org/film.

— World

Community

Film Festival