Celebrating Cinema
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Celebrating Cinema. With this issue we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Protestant film organisation Interfilm. Founded in Paris in 1955, its first President was Henri de Tienda, a minister in the navy and General Secretary of the Service cinématographique d’évangelisation of the Reformed Church of France. One of Interfilm’s main activities was – and remains – its involvement in juries at national and international film festivals. In the early days, the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches had separate juries. However, in 1973 in co-operation with the Organisation Catholique Internationale pour le Cinéma et l’Audiovisuel (OCIC), today known as Signis, the very first Ecumenical Jury met at the Locarno Film Festival, where it is still held in high regard.
Charles Arthur
A remarkable event took place in a small south coast town in Haiti in July 2004. Over ten days from 9 July, the first Jacmel film festival featured 195 projections of 85 films shown free-of-charge at six different venues, including a large open-air public space for night-time screenings. More than 20 directors attended, with delegations travelling from as far as France and Spain, as well as Cuba, Jamaica and the United States, and some of these visiting directors hosted workshops on various aspects of film-making.
‘An editor is one who separates the wheat from the chaff – and prints the chaff,’ said the American lawyer and statesman Adlai Stevenson. This is not true of Pradip Thomas who, as editor of Media Development from 1994 to 2004, was adept at the lost art of winnowing. Pradip left the staff of the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) at the end of last year to take up a post as Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. We bid him farewell.
Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick
‘The citizen is completely helpless. He does not hear any other voice; and if everybody says the same, it must be true.’ The lament is from Uri Avnery, veteran leader of Israel’s peace movement, in our Peace Journalism video, News from the Holy Land, on coverage of the conflict with the Palestinians.
Dr. William F. Fore
Former WACC President
It is a rare thing in human history that one can experience the rise and fall of a great nation in one's own lifetime. It took more than a thousand years for ancient China to come and go, six hundred for Rome, perhaps two hundred each for Spain and England. In the case of America, it has happened in about fifty years.
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