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First Run/Icarus Films is proud to be working with The Global Film Initiative, a New York-based, nonprofit foundation working with leading American cultural institutions to promote cross-cultural understanding through cinema. For the Global Lens series, each year the Initiative acquires ten narrative films from the developing world that tour the United States for one year to 14 cities including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston. As the tour progresses, First Run/Icarus Films will handle all sales of videos of these titles to educational institutions.
History repeatedly points to the importance of great storytelling in human affairs. Even today, an authentic narrative can foster trust and respect between disparate cultures and mitigate cultural prejudice. In recent times, no medium has been as effective at communicating the range and diversity of the world's cultures as the cinematic arts.
The stability of America's ethnic mosaic depends on deep cross-cultural understanding, particularly between young Americans and the children of recently arrived immigrants. The Initiative's first ten films (see below) give value to stories from every corner of the world, and can play a vital educational role in promoting tolerance in all areas of human behavior.
Titles in the series:
- Almost Brothers - Through the story of a life-long friendship across class lines, this film delves simultaneously into Brazil's painful political past and raw current events.
- Border Cafe - Reyhan, an Iranian widow and mother of two young children, reopens the roadhouse formerly run by her husband, but as this is taboo for women, she encounters much resistance.
- Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures - Two young men travel the dusty wilderness roads of Northeastern Brazil in the early 1940s, stopping in towns and villages to sell the new miracle drug, aspirin.
- In the Battlefields - In the war-torn Beirut of 1983, a family struggles not only with nightly bombing in the city, but also with the battle taking place inside their own home.
- Max and Mona - A black comedy about a South African village boy with extraordinary mourning skills, who journeys to a daunting city to become a "white doctor."
- The Night of Truth -In an imaginary country in Africa with economic and political conditions like Sudan and Sierra Leone, after ten years of civil war the president and the rebel leader agree to hold a night of feasting when a peace agreement will be signed.
- Stolen Life - Yan-ni, a withdrawn, sullen young woman convinced that her fate is out of her hands, is accepted to college, but chance a relationship that triggers a series of unfortunate events.
- Thirst - It has been 10 years since Abu Shukri and his family fled a scandal involving his older daughter Gamila and settled in a dusty, arid valley in the middle of nowhere, far away from their hometown.
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