I first came across the idea of Pangea Day as a film-making exercise addressed to all. The brief was to make a short film illustrating one of the hundreds of human universals discovered by, amongst others, anthropologost Donald Brown. I watched Pangea Day yesterday and was amazed at how smoothly it all went from a technical point of view. I watched it all on the internet and only dropped out once during the whole four hours and I think that was my computer more than anything else. There were only one or two very minor technical hitches in the last hour or so. Inevitably I am comparing this event to those such as Live Aid and maybe the advantage here was that they were dealing mainly with showing film which was all ready to go, rather than live music outdoors with attendant potential for glitches. It was a nice mix of mainly film with a few interviews, a handful of monologues and some live music from Brazilians, Iranianans, Malians and others. I particularly liked Glberto Gil's music. As is so often the case with special events such as these, the day was the result of the vision of one individual, in this case Jehane Noujaim, an Egyptian American.
Pangea Day was meant to be a celebration of human universals and this was partly used to make a plea for an end to conflict in Israel and Palestine 'because in the end we all want the same things'. The event was also a celebration of the short film. Every film shown had merit and I learned a few things such as that condoms in Mozambique are often bought to make footballs rather than for their original purpose! Other films which made a mark included The Slap from Iran, and 'J'attendrai le suivant' (I'll wait for the next one) from France. Difficult to watch was Inja (Dog) based in South Africa. I also learned that in promoting this day on our podcast I had been pronouncing it wrongly with a hard g instead of a soft g.
Even the problem of the digital divide was addressed, in part, by the giving away of mobile phones in various parts of the world so that a wider range of people could submit films.
Of the speakers, I was particularly impressed by what Robert Kurzban had to say. In a nutshell his research tells us that prejudice can be overcome. This is quite a contrast to the usual belief that it is almost impossible to dislodge ingrained attitudes. Another intriguing speaker was Jonathan Harris who has made an amazing website of art forms derived from the harvesting of human feelings from all over the internet.
I was pleased to see that Yann Arthus-Bertrand's 6 Billion Others was widely used to illustrate themes such as happiness, sorrow and anger.
I also appreciated the live blogging of the event even though it was more of a retrospective timetable than a commentary. Unfortunately I didn't manage to hook up with any of my Webhead friends even though I was regularly visiting two of their usual online chat haunts.
This was a consciousness-raising event rather than a fundraising one though and so I think that the presenters were at a loss to be precise about what action individuals should take as a result of being a part of the day. 'Give us your money now!' was not an option and some of them were left floundering and eventually told us to go to the website, look at the blog and...'
Overall the thesis is that once we get to know each other we are less likely to be in conflict. And getting to know each other is getting easier all the time through the medium of film and other digital technologies. I think it succeeded admirably in creating a feeling that you were sharing a world event on an individual to individual basis mainly because of the live blog commenting function. I tried to check whether the Day was being broadcast by any major TV channels. It certainly wasn't carried here in Denmark and I was in the middle of trying to see if it had been shown on British TV when the computer locked up but I have a feeling that it was not attractive to TV stations. So more a grassroots event than a broadcast event. However I don't think that our podcast, Absolutely Intercultural, is about to be made redundant in the near future.
Keywords: 6 Billion Others, Pangea Day
