By Vanessa Garcia

“A Sundance for Ibero-American film,” says The Wall Street Journal. “The Cannes of the Americas,” says The New York Times. This is just a pairing of the praise amounted for the Miami International Film Festival [MIFF], sponsored by Miami Dade College, under the direction of Nicole Guillenet. According to Carol Ann Lafferty, the Managing Director of the MIFF, the MIFF began in 1984, but since 2003 has focused on developing a program of international film, especially Ibero-American Cinema (film from Latin America, Spain, and Portugal). This year, the organizing team behind MIFF continues to broaden its angle, taking on even wider international sponsorship through the Global Lens project.

The Festival

Global Lens is a film festival created by the Global Film Initiative (GFI), based out of New York, and which has joined with Miami to showcase a skillfully selected group of films from writers and directors across borders and cultures of the developing world. Global Lens is a traveling festival – GFI affiliates include the likes of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The San Francisco Art Institute, and others – the festival zooms into Miami this fall at Miami’s Tower theatre from September 16th through 24th, 2006.



The Films

The films presented through this initiative hail from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Continents and countries which find themselves ravaged by poverty and civil wars; drowning in problems the first world is often oblivious to -- whether it be the results of militaristic political regimes, genocide, or the result of decades of neglect. What better way for these stories to cross rivers and oceans, sand storms, dunes, and cultural canyons, than to project them across movie screens -- the most far-reaching of artistic tongues. But the feat of transporting ideas is not as easy as it seems, especially in country taken over by blockbusters and box office hits, where dialogue is seen in dollar signs instead of human tales.

The Global Film Initiative’s website states: “In recent times, no medium has been as effective at communicating the range and diversity of the world’s cultures as the cinematic arts. But this vital contribution to cultural diversity has been threatened by shifting economic conditions.” In other words, due to the fact that tinsel-town, or Hollywood, has monopolized the cinematic market, often voices from the third world are not heard, or only heard in whispers. How many art houses, or small movie houses can you count in Miami; or in most cities across the USA, for that matter? Not many.

In turn, it is America that is affected by this collapse of cinematic communication. The big screen seldom speaks to American teens at a Friday night movie about what is going on in the world that surrounds them.

Ask a young American to define “reality” and more often than not they’ll point to “reality TV shows,” which are simply another form of tinseling or gilding truths. In a realm of “American Idols,” and “Project Runways,” American youth suffers from what the GFI calls, “a lack of exposure to other cultures” - hence affecting - the stability of America’s ethnic mosaic (which) depends on deep cross-cultural understanding, particularly between young Americans and the children of immigrants. We live next to each other, but we don’t know each other’s stories, our deep-rooted histories, and the things that make us who we are.
The Global Lens is an attempt to not only give voice to “other” productions that make up our close-knit globalized world, but also expand the voices of developing worlds into “cinemascope.” In his essay entitled, Imaginary Homelands, the writer Salman Rushdie tries to explain the predicament of the immigrant using the metaphor of film and photography.

Born in Bombay, Rushdie - who now lives in New York - was raised in Britain. With this patchwork of culture on his back, Rushdie in his essay recounts revisiting his native India and writing his novel Midnight’s Children. He says: “I realized how much I wanted to restore the past to myself, not in the faded greys of old family album snapshots, but whole, in Cinemascope and glorious Technicolor.”

This is the power of cinema. It has infiltrated our language. And it speaks in collage - in splices of time and negative space edited together, like the mosaics of immigrant populations we have created in our urban centers. Which brings us to the importance of having this festival in Miami.

Miami

If you look up Miami’s ethnic population, it’s difficult to surmise exact statistics. Our graphs have become three dimensional because people can no longer answer questions of background as straightforwardly as in the past. Often times we are faced with “Two-race multiracial combination” statistical charts, for instance. Try and decipher our make-up and it is like deciphering DNA without a microscope. To keep pace with the 21st century, it becomes essential to use the fastest of all possible speeds to both literally and figuratively, bring together the splices and edits, reeling them into a story that will, in turn, magnify our cultural DNA as people living in cities, living in nations, and continents of a global economy and cultural fabric.

For example - take a film like “Border Café.” This is just one of the eight films showcased this year at the festival - not including the many shorts. It, on the surface, is a 2005 Iranian film, 105 minutes long. Written and directed by Kambozia Partovi, it is a film about a woman trying to make an independent life for herself and her two girls as a young widow in Iran. When she decides to take over her late husband’s “border café,” she finds hardships abound, but she also finds herself making friends - and loved ones - of a Greek truck driver and a nineteen-year old Russian girl, who herself is running towards Italy, in search of a sister. All of these stories unfold individually and into each other - and, as a result into the viewer. It speaks to us in Farsi, Greek, Turkish, Russian, and from the English subtitles.

With those subtitles the film gets translated into English in more ways than one - it becomes a film about all of our borders and border crossings. It becomes a film about women of the world; a film about Bush’s immigration laws; it helps us understand our Farsi neighbor; our best mate’s Russian girlfriend...

The MIFF had 67,000 people attend this years 2006 International Film Festival, bringing in more than 300,000 filmmakers, producers, talent and industry representatives from around the world. It also held more than 250 screenings, including features, shorts, outreach and press. What those numbers show is an exceptional use of our geographic and cultural positioning - and the potential of scope which they present to The Global Lens Project and which The Global lens, in turn, presents to us, as Miamians - and as Americans.

Global Lens Film Festival
www.globalfilm.org
www.miamifilmfestival.com