Moving pictures and raising awareness

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

By Ben Cannon

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Where does one even begin when considering the Jackson Hole Film Festival?

Celebrating its fifth birthday, the film festival just concluded holding a heady court, counting among its highlights a keynote address by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

This year’s film fest marked the outset of a partnership between the United Nations and the Jackson Hole Film Institute. Festival organizers and U.N. officials said they hoped it would be the beginning of a long relationship, one that might eventually foster new films to tell some of the world’s unheard stories. And there are many.
“The creative community has a far-reaching influence that can be harnessed for the great good,” Ban told the Jackson Hole audience Friday during a speech at the Center for Arts.

The film festival, a venue for independent and foreign-made films, features a component unlike what’s found at the world’s established festivals at Sundance, Cannes and Toronto. The Global Insight Summit is a means to bring entertainment industry leaders, top U.N. officials and victims of the myriad world plights together to shed light on those matters.

While a wide gamut of fictional and documentary, serious and not-so-serious films screened throughout the five-day event, Saturday saw a pair of panel discussions on child soldiers and the world HIV/AIDS epidemic.

“Those were both really amazing experiences,” said Thos Robinson, a New York City-based photographer who lives in Jackson Hole during parts of the year.
At the HIV/AIDS panel discussion, audience members were made to confront the staggering state of a disease that in the United States is no longer an immediate death sentence - and fair to say the issue receives less attention nationally because of that - yet continues to exact a tremendous toll on the world’s developing nations, particularly the very young residents of those places. Nearly 2.1 million people under the age of 15 suffer from HIV/AIDS.

On the panel was 12-year-old Keren Gonzalez, a Honduran girl living with HIV who has become an outspoken activist for young people living with the disease in her country.
Someone in the audience asked her what advice she gives to young people with HIV/AIDS.

“Follow your dreams,” she said.
One independent Hollywood producer, Steve Shor, who sat on the film fest screening committee, which helped pare down the 1,000 film submissions the film institute received this year, said he was impressed by the festival, his first.
“The United Nations thing is a coup for this festival,” Shor said over a Stella Artois beer Sunday.

The U.N. announced during the fest its newly anointed special office that will serve as a liaison between the New York-based organization and producers, directors and writers. The office is designed to open a new interface between filmmakers and television programmers, allowing projects opportunities for editorial input by the U.N., and connecting the creative community with “relevant experts,” a U.N. release stated.
The partnership as a whole, while lending the festival a certain level of credibility, or at least notoriety, is also a way to help the U.N., an organization embattled over the years in geopolitical controversy, to reintroduce itself and the wide-reaching programs it implements.

“They need to improve public knowledge about what they do everyday,” said festival managing director Todd Rankin.

Rankin said that while festival organizers consider the U.N. partnership a key element to the future of the festival and is one they hope will eventually have deepening impacts to films, the film fest remains a pragmatic happening, one just as defined by a variety of film screening opportunities as by a weighty partnership with the world’s largest humanitarian organization.

“As far as what someone can take away from it, they can take away whatever they want,” Rankin said. “But someone who might not otherwise go to an event that focuses on humanitarian issues might get drawn in or become inspired to get involved. There’s a lot outside of Jackson Hole going on in the world. In this era of globalization you need to know about what going on. In the end it affects us all.”

Courtesy Thos Robinson/WireImage
Ban Ki-moon addresses Jackson Hole.

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