The UNU-produced documentary Voices of the Chichinautzin is part of the official selection of the Moondance International Film Festival in the Feature Documentary Category. The festival will take place in August 29, 30, 31, and September 1, in Boulder, Colorado USA.

Voices of the Chichinautzin will screen on Saturday, August 30, 2008 in the Shambala Center Community Room, 1345 Spruce Street, Boulder, Colorado 80302.

The Moondance International Film Festival, popularly known as the “American Cannes”, is one of the premier venues for the exhibition and promotion of feature and short films in the US, and one of the leading indie film festivals in the world. Dedicated to celebrating and sharing with international audiences the absolute best in the world of films and screenplays, film scores, and some 25 other genres, the festival features special presentations, retrospectives, workshops, pitch panels, a gala awards reception and ceremony, and many of the world’s top indie film screenings.

You can find a full schedule of the festival here:

www.moondancefilmfestival.com/35-Schedule.html

Today is a big day for the UNU Media Studio. We launched a new web magazine called Our World 2.0 focusing on climate change, peak oil and food security. We are witnessing a convergence of these issues and now is the time to look for solutions that ameliorate, rather exacerbate the problems.

This is a big departure for our team since we normally spend a long time building content and saying “ta-da…please come and use our wonderful educational materials.”

Sean Wood suggested that this time around we co-create new content with our colleagues in the UNU and our partners, and with as wide a community as possible.

We have never made a web magazing before and so we are learning by doing. We will share what we learn with you as well.

So please join us on this journey.

Last Friday, 4 July 2008, the UNU hosted an excellent symposium entitled Innovation and Climate Change. The speaker line up was very impressive including James E. Hansen, Gwyn Prins, David Steven, Alex Evans, Shuzo Nishioka, and Ted Nordhaus.

The UNU Media Studio team was invited along to interview all of the speakers and to create a series of podcasts. The first in the series was uploaded to the main UNU homepage on Saturday 5 July. You can see it below.

More will follow soon on the UNU website and also on the Our World 2.0 webzine.

CLIMATE CHANGE - Messages to the G8 from UNUChannel on Vimeo.

Big thanks to Citt, Luis, Naoto, Koari, and David for making this happen.

There have been some big developments over the past couple of weeks. First of all, we have set up a YouTube Channel that can be used by anyone in the UNU to share their video content. Second, we have set up an account with Tube Mogul that enable the UNU to distribute videos to a number of video portals. The idea is to place UNU videos where the audience actually is, rather than hoping people will discover them on our websites.

Third, Citt and Koari have just completed a series of seven podcasts for the UNU Priority Africa project. You can see them on the UNU Youtube Channel and they will be accessible via the UNU main website. An sample video, hosted on Vimoe, is included below to give you a better idea of the themes covered.

PRIORITY AFRICA - Climate Change from UNUChannel on Vimeo.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has just endorsed a recommendation to promote e-learning. This recommendation draws on the discussions that took place at preparatory e-conference on 1 October 2007, in which the UNU Media Studio participated via video conference (see post).

The good news is that the recommendation contains specific reference to the importance of promoting open source software and open educational resources, as proposed by the UNU. Here is the direct quotation:

“E-learning can be a powerful means of creating open educational resources accessible to everybody thus counteracting a divided knowledge society. In this regard, the Assembly calls on member parliaments to support the so-called “open source” movement in software development and initiatives for open educational resources – freely accessible on the Internet, and to adopt measures to combat the digital divide in order to close the gap between those who have access to ICT and the acquisition of ICT skills and those who do not, thus ensuring digital literacy for all.”

This is a truly important development for Europe.

Voices of the Chichinautzin was awarded Best Science and Ecology Documentary at the 2nd IberoAmerican Film Festival held in Tepotzlan, Mexico, 11-18 May 2008.

Luis Patron, from the UNU Media Studio, was on hand to pick up the special Zapata statue. He was also present at the screening and participated in the follow-on question and answer session.

The documentary tells the story of the daily struggles of the local communities as they try to protect a biodiverse region outside Mexico City from illegal logging and development pressures. It was written, directed and co-produced by Patricia Sims, produced and co-directed by Luis Patron and edited by Michael Clark. The graphics and animations were produced by Sean Wood and David Jimenez.

The documentary will be screened on television in Mexico later this year.

Note: The photo of the statue is taken from the festival website.

Some exciting news! Our website - Saving the Ayuquila River - has been selected as the webpick of the day by Communication Arts.

To put this in perspective, here is an explanation about CommArts.

“Communication Arts is the premier source of inspiration for graphic designers, art directors, design firms, corporate design departments, advertising agencies, interactive designers, illustrators and photographers—everyone involved in visual communication.”

It is great to see that websites focusing on environmental topics can also get selected as the webpick of the day. This is important international recognition of the excellent work from the team at the UNU and the University of Guadalajara, particularly Sean Wood for the Creative Direction, Janine Googan for the graphic design and animations and Luis Patron as the project coordinator.

On 15 May I traveled to the Lagunas de Zempoala National Park in central Mexico to join an event organized by the Tlahuica community of San Juan Atzingo and Greenpeace . They commemorated one year of the death of Aldo Zamora, a young environmentalist from this indigenous community who was killed by illegal loggers. The story of this tragic event is told in the UNU-produced documentary Voices of the Chichinautzin.

For me it was good to meet again Aldo’s father Ildefonso Zamora, and the Thahuica Chief Alejandro Ramirez, two of the key people featured in the documentary. I had the opportunity of giving them a DVD copy of the video, and visit their land and projects for the whole day.

I am happy to report that things had changed a lot in the area since the last time I have been there. Following Aldo’s death, the massive incursion of the army and police forces has caused illegal logging activities to decrease on an estimated 95%. The Tlahuicas have also received lots of material support from several government agencies, which includes trucks and uniforms (see photo) among other things. Their ecotourism project in the Tonatihua lagoon has been built and is already receiving visitors. Perhaps most importantly, after a legal battle which spanned several decades, the ownership of 18,000 hectares of their lands had finally been given official government recognition.

However, this success story has a very bad downside. A year has passed and justice has not been done, as the identified killers of Aldo Zamora have not been captured.

Some images from the opening ceremony of the Iberoamerican Documentary Festival in Tepoztlan, Mexico. The UNU-produced documentary Voices of the Chichinautzin is part of the official selection of the festival.

The Pangea Day event on Saturday night in the UNU Media Studio was a great success. We ended up with around 50 participants from 14 different countries for what was essentially an over-night event. The group energy remained relatively high all the way to morning as can be seen in the video that was taken some time after 6am.

It was a great experience to be a part of the first ever Pangea Day with such an interesting variety of global citizens gathered together here in the Media Studio.

Information about this world wide event and highlights of the program and many of the included films are on the Pangea Day website.