In the Arts corner of this blog, we have the screening of a series of short films to coincide with the Millennium Development Goals, expressed visually for added effect. So many times news on development seems to be numbers that cloud our grasp of the reality they mean for people lives. I spoke to Soraya Zanardo, invited to the conference, and watched the excerpts of the movies online. Were you there?

This is to give you a different take on the flavour of what was created...

'Tiya runs to school, late again…despite always having her head up in the sky, she just can’t be on time! In her tracks, she seems hampered by her purple school uniform. One could think that, like any uniform designed to instil discipline, this one should confer her some seriousness or at least solemnity in her look and punctuality in her habits.

But hers are so ample and unfit to her childish body that it floats in the wind around her skinny fragile limbs whilst running to school. Tiya is running down the burnt countryside hills, dashing through the green Somalia fields, aiming for the red sandy school ground. Late again, her beating heart tells her, but her teacher won’t scold her because he knows why she is late: she was dreaming.

Dreaming whilst finishing her sick father’s work: sewing another shirt, and another, and another… dreaming herself away. Tiya dreams at school too, always with one foot on the ground and one foot in her dreamworld. All the children in this film seem to live in dreamworld: the setting is an African school rugby playground and the ball is a watermelon, but the attitude is that of the very English Johnny Wilkinson’s and the watermelon is seriously considered as a leather rugby ball.

All these children live dreaming as it is the last bit of childhood they are allowed; but they dream it with the same sad ageing eyes that early work has imposed on them. In Tiya’s dream she hears the song of her life; she is in the classroom where her fate is being played, but her mind will come back to this place only when her classmate will ask when the Millennium Goals will cease to be a dream. Scene by scene, portrait by portrait, a cinema masterpiece is drawn in a matter of minutes.

They are somber Somalian working children, an AIDS sufferer telling his life as if a story of the past already, a curious Icelandic child, Australian teenagers releasing tears for hope, an American-Pakistani woman breaking the chains of tradition in the US…Always living on the edge and yet all so alive: one can live these places, one can live these lives.

These characters embody the very essence of humankind and make us feel at one with them. We feel their pains in our flesh, we feel their hearts beating in our chests, we feel our blood boiling with theirs and our minds full of questions like theirs. “8” is about when art makes politics enter one’s flesh.  

“8” lets us take pleasure in the mere contemplation of life, humankind and its precariousness. They are 8 portraits from 8 different painters in 1 single planet. Here the painters can make us hear, see, smell, taste and even touch different worlds'.

The 8 'painters' of these lively images are:

• • Jane Campion : segment The Water Diary
  • Gael García Bernal : segment The Letter
  • Jan Kounen : segment The story of Panshin Beka
  • Mira Nair : segment How can it be?
  • Gaspar Noé : segment SIDA
  • Abderrahmane Sissako : segment Tiya's dream
  • Gus Van Sant : segment Mansion on the hill
  • Wim Wenders : segment Person to Person

The 8 'portraits' in the form of the screenings were:

•  Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
• Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education
• Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women
• Goal 4: Reduce child mortality
• Goal 5: Improve maternal health
• Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
• Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability
• Goal 8: Develop a Global Partnership for Development

http://www.undp.org/mdg/basics.shtml