Cinema Days 2015 Seeds of Peace

Poster Cinema Days 2015 Colour

Since our school has been working in the Comenius program called "Seeds of Peace" for the last two years, our chief of department , Carmina,  proposed peace as the film topic  this year, and we could not agree more: "We really need a bit of peace", because, although western politicians, in a very cynical and self-indulgent way,  often state that "we are living the longest peaceful period in the history of humanity", when we read a newspaper or listen to or watch the news, every sensible and sensitive person realises that this could not be further from reality. 

Syria, Afghanistan,
Iraq, Ukraine, Nigeria, the never-ending Israel-Palestine conflict - such a smooth name for a long and cruel war-  .. and many other places around the world, from Africa to Asia or Centre and South America, are living on a state of permanent war.  Actually, if peace is understood as a state of lack of violence, then we might well be living one of the moments in history with the highest number of people suffering violence.  

Unless we consider that peace means only that our army is not fighting a declared war, maybe situations like the ones happening in Brazil, Mexico or Colombia, where citizens undergo the most unacceptable- if any can be-  violence of all, “criminals and authorities, democratically elected, massacring civilians, for power and money’s sake”.   I would also like to mention what has been considered the most civilized part of the world, the countries with the highest standards of living, that is the old Europe, where the northern countries, which enjoy the best social conditions,  break the records of suicides and gender violence murder rate.  Meanwhile, in the Mediterranean countries, where we are included, the financial powers, backed by the governments, get wealthier than ever, while one third of the population are unemployed or are evicted from their houses by their riot police  and their judges who enforce the legislation passed by their (??) representatives in parliament, whose salaries are paid with their taxes;  while the financial institutions, which have been rescued with their taxes too, take their houses and resell them and make loads of money which is never used to pay back to society, or help entrepreneurs start businesses.  On the contrary, they distribute benefits among big investors and the managers get indecent salaries.

Violence is an attitude based on the idea that some people are better or superior to others because of colour, sex, religion, social or economic status, etc.  Then everything is very logical, you can use your inferiors –like we use animals- as slaves, cheap workers, soldiers, sexual objects; and most of the conflicts in underdeveloped countries are caused by developed countries which are only interested in getting their products, especially oil and metals; using their inhabitants as cheap labour and putting them out of their land when there are interesting products to get from it.  There is not any interest in helping them develop.

The films that we are presenting this year are about people who devoted their lives to get equality and justice for everybody, forgetting about their own personal interests to favour the general interests of the societies or human groups to which they belonged.  In fact they look like romantic people fighting for an unachievable ideal, although at least one of them, Mandela, was as real as the sufferings he underwent to reach reconciliation between coloured and white people in South Africa, instead of taking advantage of his great popular support to take revenge on those who had him imprisoned for 27 years.