Directors of films in the forthcoming BBC series Why Poverty? explain how they tackled the subject and what it taught them
Are US billionaires destroying the American Dream? Can large-scale agricultural development have a positive effect in Africa? Are Bono and Bob Geldof actually doing any good? And can the history of human poverty over 10,000 years be told in less than 60 minutes? These and many other questions are being posed in a new series of documentaries and short films entitled Why Poverty? launching on Monday night on BBC1. The series, which will be screened in 180 countries including India, Zimbabwe and Brazil, aims to kick-start a global debate in the hope of addressing a broader question: why, in the 21st century, do a billion people live in poverty?
"I think it's an important time to be having this conversation for two reasons," says Nick Fraser, editor of BBC Storyville and co-founder of Steps International![ext]()
, the organisation behind the series. "The first is that people in rich countries and elsewhere are getting more and more perturbed about the inequalities in the world. Secondly, we are beginning to take stock of what has been done about global poverty to date. There's widespread scepticism about aid and the activities of NGOs, and a new generation is starting to think about poverty in a different way. Rather than seeking a magic bullet or a one-size-fits-all solution, they are relating the question of poverty to many different things – to human rights, to quality of government, to the individual motivations of poor people."
To introduce the Why Poverty? documentaries, which continue on BBC4 Four until 6 December, the Observer talked to some of the film-makers involved about the stories they reported on and what they learned.
**ALEX GIBNEY*: *PARK AVENUE: MONEY, POWER AND THE AMERICAN DREAM*
*
*By exposing the extreme contrast between one of the wealthiest streets in New York, and one of the poorest – both called Park Avenue – acclaimed documentary film-maker Alex Gibney (Enron, Client 9) argues that the wealthiest Americans have rigged the system in their favour, making it much harder for people to rise out of poverty.*
*How did the film come about?*
When I was asked to do something on poverty in the US, I asked if I could do something on wealth instead and how wealth creates poverty. A friend of mine pointed me towards a book by Michael Gross called 740 Park![ext]()
, which looked at a single building in Manhattan occupied by Wall Street billionaires as the microcosm of the problem. Then I found out that there was another Park Avenue, just a few miles north in the Bronx, which happened to be the poorest congressional district in the country. That gave me a good hook.
*What did you learn from making this film? Did anything shock you?*
A couple of things. I heard about a social psychology experiment that had been carried out at Berkeley using a rigged game of Monopoly. It basically said that the more you have, the more you want – and the more you get, the less sympathy you have for people who have less than you do. It suggested that the more goodies you give the ultra-rich, the less they invest in the larger society, and the less they care about everybody else. And that seemed to be borne out by some of the anecdotal evidence. I was particularly fascinated by one story from a doormen at 740 Park Avenue. He told me that when the kids who live in the building are young, they all chat with him, but when they turn 12 or 13, something mysteriously changes and they suddenly stop interacting. It's as if the parents have told them: "Look, these people are below your station. You're the son of a billionaire, so don't be talking to the help."
*The film argues that the socioeconomic system in America is rigged and that it's nearly impossible to rise out of extreme poverty. Do enough people realise this?*
I think the myth of opportunity persists, but not for those at the bottom. They would laugh at the idea of an American Dream. But for the middle class it does still persist and it's morphed into something more dangerous, what I would call the lottery culture: the belief that somehow you're going to become a very wealthy person and that's why you don't want to tinker with any of the rules that might force the rich to pay their fair share. Which I find odd, but it's the only reason I can think of to explain why people aren't more furious. You've seen a massive hollowing out of the American economy and all the wealth is going to the top. And nothing's coming to the middle or the bottom. You'd think people would be angrier than they are.
**BOSSE LINDQUIST*: *GIVE US THE MONEY**
*Swedish film-maker Bosse Lindquist (WikiRebels, The Genius and the Boys) investigates whether charity work done by celebrities such as Bono and Bob Geldof has helped or hindered Africa's poor.*
*What led you to make this documentary?*
I've been intrigued by the rise of charity and celebrity in recent decades. A lot of it looks so ugly when you see it at a distance; the combination of celebrity and poverty can be quite unpleasant. Also, I lived in east Africa for six years, so I've always felt strongly about patronising attitudes and stereotypes of Africa and I had the feeling that very little development aid actually works.
*Was it easy to persuade Bono and Geldof to be interviewed for the film?*
It was extremely hard. I had to convince them that I wasn't just interested in their fame and that I wasn't going to do a hatchet job. What convinced them in the end was that I was talking to politicians, development experts, Ethiopians who were present during the famine. Bob Geldof was somewhat easier to come on speaking terms with, but Bono was very hard to get.
*Did talking to them change your opinion of them?*
Yes. I was amazed how serious and hardworking they were. They are both extremely knowledgeable. It is hard to beat them at facts. You may disagree with their opinions, but they really are very well informed.
*Did you come around to a more positive view of what they've done?*
I think they've had some successes. Bono wasn't alone in making George Bush spend $15bn on fighting Aids in Africa in 2003, but he was important for that to happen, and that money has saved more than a million lives. He and Geldof played an important role in debt cancellation. It's hard to ascertain exactly what impact they've had but they've definitely had an impact.
*In the film it was pointed out that, in order to end poverty, you have to restructure the global economy rather than simply raising money.*
It is a very pertinent point. However, while we're waiting for a greater solution, it's good that somebody is doing something. And Bono and Geldof have done more than most people.
**MONA ELDAIEF*: *SOLAR MAMAS**
*In Solar Mamas, co-directed by Mona Eldaief (Her Name is Zelda) and Jehane Noujaim (Control Room![ext]()
), a mother of four from a remote Jordanian village is given an opportunity to train as a solar engineer at India's Barefoot College![ext]()
, along with 27 other women from poor communities around the world, but she faces opposition at home.*
*How did the film come about?*
The director of Barefoot College, Bunker Roy, received a Skoll Foundation![ext]()
award for social entrepreneurship in partnership with the Sundance Institute![ext]()
, and my co-director, Jehane, was approached by Sundance to make a film about the college.
*What's the idea behind Barefoot College?*
They travel the world to find women from very poor and rural communities off the electrical grid and bring them to Rajasthan to train them for six months as solar engineers. When the women go back to their communities, they install solar power and are paid a certain amount each month. So the engineers get a salary and the houses get light. They also set up centres to train other women. Bunker Roy has always said that he prefers to train grandmothers because they stay in the village, instead of migrating to the nearest city to find a job.
*But Rafea, the main subject of your film, isn't a grandmother.*
No. She was recruited because a woman in a nearby village decided at the last minute not to go. Rafea has the makings of a powerhouse in the business world; she's extremely intelligent and has always wanted an opportunity to use her brain.
*The film is as much about the obstacles these women face at home as it is about education and solar engineering.*
Rafea's village was very much ingrained in a cycle of thought that contributes to poverty, which is hopelessness. Until two generations ago, the people in her village were Bedouins. They were nomadic sheep herders, and because of severe drought in Jordan and collateral damage from the war in Iraq, they settled into villages. A lot of them don't have national ID so they're not eligible for welfare. The men end up smuggling drugs across borders. They get caught and spend time in prison, but there's no other opportunity. Meanwhile, women are meant to stay in the house and avoid work opportunities – it's shameful for them even to get an education.
*So conservative beliefs play into poverty.*
Absolutely. And as people get poorer and more hopeless, their thought gets more conservative. This is one of the reasons Rafea was ordered to come home shortly after her arrival at Barefoot College. It was basically: stop this education or you'll lose your children.
*Why was this film important to make?*
There are so many women like Rafea in the Arab world, and yet there's such a stereotypical portrayal of Arabs in the media that you hardly ever see strong characters like her. She sets an amazing example.
**BEN LEWIS*: *POOR US – AN ANIMATED HISTORY OF POVERTY**
*Director Ben Lewis (The Great Contemporary Art Bubble![ext]()
) animates the history of poverty from the stone age to the present day and asks why, despite progress over time, there is still acute inequality in the world today.*
*When you're faced with the task of condensing 10,000 years of history into 58 minutes, where do you begin?*
It's a daft amount of time, but there's something fun about doing everything in a film this length. I went to the British Library and looked into poverty studies, a historical sub-discipline that has produced some extraordinary micro-histories of poverty in the past 15 years or so. One book I read was Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris![ext]()
, which is based on an inquiry held in the 13th century in which seven or eight really poor people in Paris were asked to tell their story. Effectively, there was a possibility of getting poor people from the past to sort of speak to me.
*The film also asks why there is still such huge inequality today. What did you learn?*
That people don't really agree on what the problem is. The poorer parts of the world – China, Brazil, parts of Africa – are becoming a lot richer and some economists argue that poverty is on the way out. But also we're at a transitional moment where the poverty problem has been replaced by an inequality problem, which is growing so big that you could in a way call it a poverty problem again.
*Did you end up feeling more or less pessimistic?*
I got a sense that there's a pattern. You get a good system in place to reduce poverty – say the Christian church – and for a few hundred years it does quite well helping the poor. Then it changes and they start using the way they legitimate their existence, helping the poor, to get loads of money which they spend on building cathedrals. It's a simplification but you get my point. Do we not today have a similar problem with globalisation? As the historian Tim Hitchcock says in the film, you get the solution right and then the rich and the middle classes pile in and take all the resources.
*What would a solution to poverty look like?*
As I made the film, what struck me was that the solution is a combination of a lot of different things and that we kind of got it right at the end of the 19th century, with a recipe that was a bit of the free market, a bit of the welfare state, a bit of political stability, and so on, and those things do crack poverty. So we shouldn't really think the solution is capitalism or communism, because it's actually a combination of these different factors. Each time the recipe is different, and the order you add the ingredients is different, and you never know how to get that recipe right – you just have to keep trying.
If you get it right, huge numbers of people rise out of poverty very fast, as we're seeing in Africa. But you will only get that recipe right for a short amount of time.
**WEIJUN CHEN: CHINA'S ANT PEOPLE*
*
*Chinese film-maker Weijun Chen (Please Vote for Me, The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World) exposes a scam at the heart of China's education system that is worsening the plight of impoverished rural families and increasing the economic gap between city and countryside. Chen's film asks whether education really can help people out of poverty.*
*What led you to make this film?*
I was born into a peasant family, and when I was a teenager I was able to get into university by studying hard. At that time, there were as many students from the countryside in my class at university as students from the city. But in the 1980s, the Chinese government changed the education system and made it more commercial.
*What effect did that have?*
All the good teachers gathered in the cities where people have more money to support their children. In the countryside, the conditions grew worse. To get into one of the good universities supported by the government, you need a high score in your entrance exams, but because education is so bad many students in the countryside score very low. Out of 300 students, only one or two are getting into government-supported universities. Meanwhile, the government have encouraged the building of privately run colleges all over China.
*Why are they a problem?*
Their only goal is to earn money – they don't care about anything else. They charge often three times as much for tuition as the good universities. The average income in the countryside is very low and families have to borrow money to pay the fees: some parents pay a lifetime's earnings to put one student through college, but the standard of teaching in the commercial colleges is very bad and when the students graduate, they can't find a good job.
*Will the film be shown in China?*
Not by the government media. But my films always leak in – someone will upload it to the internet, or an underground company will make DVDs and people in China will buy it. If someone in poverty watches this film, I hope it will make them realise that, if they've studied hard and worked hard and are still very poor, then the problem is in the system and not in themselves.
**CHRISTOFFER GULDBRANDSEN: STEALING AFRICA*
*
*In spite of its vast copper resources, Zambia remains one of the poorest countries in the world. This documentary by Danish film-maker Christoffer Guldbrandsen (The President, The Road to Europe) shows how multinational corporations are exploiting Africa's mineral wealth and giving very little in return.*
*There has been a lot of excitement recently about an economic boom in Africa. Do you feel there's another side to the story?*
Yes I definitely do. Everybody can see there's growth in Africa in traditional terms but there's also growth in inequality, which feeds into poverty. It also appears that it's not a very healthy form of growth: in many countries it is based on extraction of unrenewable resources, and when the resources are used up there'll be no more growth unless alternative industries have been created and infrastructure and education are strengthened. This is obviously not happening in Zambia. They're still dealing with a lot of the same issues they were 10 years ago, despite being very resourceful in terms of copper which has more than quadrupled in price over the same period.
*Who's to blame?*
I think it's a global systemic problem and it's born out of the idea of deregulation: if we just let the free hand of the market rule, even in places like Africa, it will sort out all the problems. But the problem with Africa is that there are so many factors, such as corruption, that make it impossible for the market to regulate itself.
Zambia desperately needed foreign investment to develop their copper mines, but privatising the mines and selling them indiscriminately, with such a lack of regulation, was not the best way to go. It is almost ironic that they sold the Mopani copper mine, which I feature in the film, to a consortium led by Glencore, whose founder had to flee the US in what was at the time the biggest ever tax-evasion case in US history. Those are the guys they're selling their family silver to. It questions the validity of the idea that the free hand of the market will sort it out, because it's not always free and it's not always playing by the book.
**BRIAN HILL: FOUR BORN EVERY SECOND**
Reading on mobile? Click here to see the audio slideshow![ext]()
*Four Born Every Second, directed by Brian Hill (Feltham Sings, The Not Dead), takes a look at infant mortality around the world and highlights the disparities that exist between – and within – three very different countries: America, Cambodia and Sierra Leone, one of the worst places on earth to be born.*
*Why did you decide to make this film?*
Infant mortality is a subject that doesn't get covered very often, and it's a very visible example of the effects of poverty. It's a simple equation: if you're poor, your chances of surviving are very limited compared to if you're rich. And of course that's not just to do with the country you're born in: we know that people within rich countries like America get a bad deal too.
*Was it difficult to make?*
The research took a long time. To start with, you've got to figure out which countries to go to. The worst country in the world to be born at the moment is Afghanistan, but it's so atypical and it's in a war situation so it's probably not a good idea to go there. After taking practical considerations on board, and with huge help from Unicef, we decided to go to Sierra Leone, which is one of the worst places.
*Were you shocked by what you saw there?*
On the very first day in Sierra Leone we saw two stillborn babies. That was quite bracing. I get asked a lot about how things like that affect me, but it kind of balances with the great things you're seeing. In Sierra Leone we were treated with incredible kindness and generosity, and the village where our subject, Hawa, lives felt like a real community.
*Where did you see improvement, and where did you see things getting worse?*
We only spent a short time in each place so it hard to make generalisations, but we wanted to go to Cambodia because it is improving. Maternal mortality has decreased by 58% between 1990 and 2009. That's largely due to healthcare provision being extended to poor people, but it's still the case that only 44% of births are attended by skilled medical practitioners. The problem with statistics is that they're so hotly debated, but some people think it's gotten worse in America. Others think it's gotten a little better – but it's still bad. America is one of the worst places to be born in the developing world.
*Did you get a sense of why that was?*
It's complicated. It's partly to do with poverty, the fact that there are now so many people living beneath the poverty line in America without access to the same levels of health service as people with insurance. But it's also to do with the over-medicalisation of birth in America, and partly to do with obesity and poor health. The high rate of teen pregnancies is another factor.
*What do you hope to achieve with the film?*
We tried not to make it relentlessly miserable, and I hope people will take some kind of hope from it. But I also hope it will shock, and that people will send money to Unicef and Medicins Sans Frontiers. And that people will think about the plight of a lot of people in the world and do something about it.
**HUGO BERKELEY: LAND RUSH**
*As millions of acres of farmland in Africa are being bought up by corporations and foreign governments, Hugo Berkeley (A Normal Life, The Market Maker) and co-director Osvalde Lewat (Sderot, Last Exit) investigate a large-scale agricultural development project in Mali that promises to enrich the impoverished local community, but at the expense of an ancient way of life.*
*What inspired the film?*
I made a film in Ethiopia a couple of years ago about small-scale farming and agricultural development, so I was very interested in that subject, and I'd noticed a huge expansion of land purchasing in Africa since 2008. After reading about Mali, I thought it would make a fascinating subject for further investigation, particularly the Office du Niger region, which seemed to have such a rich variety of different forces vying to control it.
*The film closely follows the heads of a project called SoSuMar, which was trying to clear space for massive sugar cane plantations in the Office du Niger. What was the most compelling argument in favour of the project?*
The best argument was that economic development was going to bring money and modern conveniences – running water and electricity, education and healthcare – into communities where they simply didn't exist. A lot of people don't have enough money to pay for healthcare, and the idea of jobs to keep children of elder farmers on the land was a big one. But there was a sizeable portion of the population who wanted to maintain their traditional lifestyle and didn't want to be moved off their land, and that created a very fundamental divide.
*Why do you think the film was important to make?*
Because agricultural development is one of the most important issues for poverty in Africa. So many people are involved in farming and yet the way forward for farming is very unclear. So I think trying to understand what the benefits of large-scale and small-scale development are, and how they can be united, is a big challenge for alleviating poverty in a systemic way in Africa. I hope that dealing with the subject in a non-ideological way will allow more people to experience both sides of the argument. Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.
Are US billionaires destroying the American Dream? Can large-scale agricultural development have a positive effect in Africa? Are Bono and Bob Geldof actually doing any good? And can the history of human poverty over 10,000 years be told in less than 60 minutes? These and many other questions are being posed in a new series of documentaries and short films entitled Why Poverty? launching on Monday night on BBC1. The series, which will be screened in 180 countries including India, Zimbabwe and Brazil, aims to kick-start a global debate in the hope of addressing a broader question: why, in the 21st century, do a billion people live in poverty?
"I think it's an important time to be having this conversation for two reasons," says Nick Fraser, editor of BBC Storyville and co-founder of Steps International
, the organisation behind the series. "The first is that people in rich countries and elsewhere are getting more and more perturbed about the inequalities in the world. Secondly, we are beginning to take stock of what has been done about global poverty to date. There's widespread scepticism about aid and the activities of NGOs, and a new generation is starting to think about poverty in a different way. Rather than seeking a magic bullet or a one-size-fits-all solution, they are relating the question of poverty to many different things – to human rights, to quality of government, to the individual motivations of poor people."To introduce the Why Poverty? documentaries, which continue on BBC4 Four until 6 December, the Observer talked to some of the film-makers involved about the stories they reported on and what they learned.
**ALEX GIBNEY*: *PARK AVENUE: MONEY, POWER AND THE AMERICAN DREAM*
*
*By exposing the extreme contrast between one of the wealthiest streets in New York, and one of the poorest – both called Park Avenue – acclaimed documentary film-maker Alex Gibney (Enron, Client 9) argues that the wealthiest Americans have rigged the system in their favour, making it much harder for people to rise out of poverty.*
*How did the film come about?*
When I was asked to do something on poverty in the US, I asked if I could do something on wealth instead and how wealth creates poverty. A friend of mine pointed me towards a book by Michael Gross called 740 Park
, which looked at a single building in Manhattan occupied by Wall Street billionaires as the microcosm of the problem. Then I found out that there was another Park Avenue, just a few miles north in the Bronx, which happened to be the poorest congressional district in the country. That gave me a good hook.*What did you learn from making this film? Did anything shock you?*
A couple of things. I heard about a social psychology experiment that had been carried out at Berkeley using a rigged game of Monopoly. It basically said that the more you have, the more you want – and the more you get, the less sympathy you have for people who have less than you do. It suggested that the more goodies you give the ultra-rich, the less they invest in the larger society, and the less they care about everybody else. And that seemed to be borne out by some of the anecdotal evidence. I was particularly fascinated by one story from a doormen at 740 Park Avenue. He told me that when the kids who live in the building are young, they all chat with him, but when they turn 12 or 13, something mysteriously changes and they suddenly stop interacting. It's as if the parents have told them: "Look, these people are below your station. You're the son of a billionaire, so don't be talking to the help."
*The film argues that the socioeconomic system in America is rigged and that it's nearly impossible to rise out of extreme poverty. Do enough people realise this?*
I think the myth of opportunity persists, but not for those at the bottom. They would laugh at the idea of an American Dream. But for the middle class it does still persist and it's morphed into something more dangerous, what I would call the lottery culture: the belief that somehow you're going to become a very wealthy person and that's why you don't want to tinker with any of the rules that might force the rich to pay their fair share. Which I find odd, but it's the only reason I can think of to explain why people aren't more furious. You've seen a massive hollowing out of the American economy and all the wealth is going to the top. And nothing's coming to the middle or the bottom. You'd think people would be angrier than they are.
**BOSSE LINDQUIST*: *GIVE US THE MONEY**
*Swedish film-maker Bosse Lindquist (WikiRebels, The Genius and the Boys) investigates whether charity work done by celebrities such as Bono and Bob Geldof has helped or hindered Africa's poor.*
*What led you to make this documentary?*
I've been intrigued by the rise of charity and celebrity in recent decades. A lot of it looks so ugly when you see it at a distance; the combination of celebrity and poverty can be quite unpleasant. Also, I lived in east Africa for six years, so I've always felt strongly about patronising attitudes and stereotypes of Africa and I had the feeling that very little development aid actually works.
*Was it easy to persuade Bono and Geldof to be interviewed for the film?*
It was extremely hard. I had to convince them that I wasn't just interested in their fame and that I wasn't going to do a hatchet job. What convinced them in the end was that I was talking to politicians, development experts, Ethiopians who were present during the famine. Bob Geldof was somewhat easier to come on speaking terms with, but Bono was very hard to get.
*Did talking to them change your opinion of them?*
Yes. I was amazed how serious and hardworking they were. They are both extremely knowledgeable. It is hard to beat them at facts. You may disagree with their opinions, but they really are very well informed.
*Did you come around to a more positive view of what they've done?*
I think they've had some successes. Bono wasn't alone in making George Bush spend $15bn on fighting Aids in Africa in 2003, but he was important for that to happen, and that money has saved more than a million lives. He and Geldof played an important role in debt cancellation. It's hard to ascertain exactly what impact they've had but they've definitely had an impact.
*In the film it was pointed out that, in order to end poverty, you have to restructure the global economy rather than simply raising money.*
It is a very pertinent point. However, while we're waiting for a greater solution, it's good that somebody is doing something. And Bono and Geldof have done more than most people.
**MONA ELDAIEF*: *SOLAR MAMAS**
*In Solar Mamas, co-directed by Mona Eldaief (Her Name is Zelda) and Jehane Noujaim (Control Room
), a mother of four from a remote Jordanian village is given an opportunity to train as a solar engineer at India's Barefoot College, along with 27 other women from poor communities around the world, but she faces opposition at home.**How did the film come about?*
The director of Barefoot College, Bunker Roy, received a Skoll Foundation
award for social entrepreneurship in partnership with the Sundance Institute, and my co-director, Jehane, was approached by Sundance to make a film about the college.*What's the idea behind Barefoot College?*
They travel the world to find women from very poor and rural communities off the electrical grid and bring them to Rajasthan to train them for six months as solar engineers. When the women go back to their communities, they install solar power and are paid a certain amount each month. So the engineers get a salary and the houses get light. They also set up centres to train other women. Bunker Roy has always said that he prefers to train grandmothers because they stay in the village, instead of migrating to the nearest city to find a job.
*But Rafea, the main subject of your film, isn't a grandmother.*
No. She was recruited because a woman in a nearby village decided at the last minute not to go. Rafea has the makings of a powerhouse in the business world; she's extremely intelligent and has always wanted an opportunity to use her brain.
*The film is as much about the obstacles these women face at home as it is about education and solar engineering.*
Rafea's village was very much ingrained in a cycle of thought that contributes to poverty, which is hopelessness. Until two generations ago, the people in her village were Bedouins. They were nomadic sheep herders, and because of severe drought in Jordan and collateral damage from the war in Iraq, they settled into villages. A lot of them don't have national ID so they're not eligible for welfare. The men end up smuggling drugs across borders. They get caught and spend time in prison, but there's no other opportunity. Meanwhile, women are meant to stay in the house and avoid work opportunities – it's shameful for them even to get an education.
*So conservative beliefs play into poverty.*
Absolutely. And as people get poorer and more hopeless, their thought gets more conservative. This is one of the reasons Rafea was ordered to come home shortly after her arrival at Barefoot College. It was basically: stop this education or you'll lose your children.
*Why was this film important to make?*
There are so many women like Rafea in the Arab world, and yet there's such a stereotypical portrayal of Arabs in the media that you hardly ever see strong characters like her. She sets an amazing example.
**BEN LEWIS*: *POOR US – AN ANIMATED HISTORY OF POVERTY**
*Director Ben Lewis (The Great Contemporary Art Bubble
) animates the history of poverty from the stone age to the present day and asks why, despite progress over time, there is still acute inequality in the world today.**When you're faced with the task of condensing 10,000 years of history into 58 minutes, where do you begin?*
It's a daft amount of time, but there's something fun about doing everything in a film this length. I went to the British Library and looked into poverty studies, a historical sub-discipline that has produced some extraordinary micro-histories of poverty in the past 15 years or so. One book I read was Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris
, which is based on an inquiry held in the 13th century in which seven or eight really poor people in Paris were asked to tell their story. Effectively, there was a possibility of getting poor people from the past to sort of speak to me.*The film also asks why there is still such huge inequality today. What did you learn?*
That people don't really agree on what the problem is. The poorer parts of the world – China, Brazil, parts of Africa – are becoming a lot richer and some economists argue that poverty is on the way out. But also we're at a transitional moment where the poverty problem has been replaced by an inequality problem, which is growing so big that you could in a way call it a poverty problem again.
*Did you end up feeling more or less pessimistic?*
I got a sense that there's a pattern. You get a good system in place to reduce poverty – say the Christian church – and for a few hundred years it does quite well helping the poor. Then it changes and they start using the way they legitimate their existence, helping the poor, to get loads of money which they spend on building cathedrals. It's a simplification but you get my point. Do we not today have a similar problem with globalisation? As the historian Tim Hitchcock says in the film, you get the solution right and then the rich and the middle classes pile in and take all the resources.
*What would a solution to poverty look like?*
As I made the film, what struck me was that the solution is a combination of a lot of different things and that we kind of got it right at the end of the 19th century, with a recipe that was a bit of the free market, a bit of the welfare state, a bit of political stability, and so on, and those things do crack poverty. So we shouldn't really think the solution is capitalism or communism, because it's actually a combination of these different factors. Each time the recipe is different, and the order you add the ingredients is different, and you never know how to get that recipe right – you just have to keep trying.
If you get it right, huge numbers of people rise out of poverty very fast, as we're seeing in Africa. But you will only get that recipe right for a short amount of time.
**WEIJUN CHEN: CHINA'S ANT PEOPLE*
*
*Chinese film-maker Weijun Chen (Please Vote for Me, The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World) exposes a scam at the heart of China's education system that is worsening the plight of impoverished rural families and increasing the economic gap between city and countryside. Chen's film asks whether education really can help people out of poverty.*
*What led you to make this film?*
I was born into a peasant family, and when I was a teenager I was able to get into university by studying hard. At that time, there were as many students from the countryside in my class at university as students from the city. But in the 1980s, the Chinese government changed the education system and made it more commercial.
*What effect did that have?*
All the good teachers gathered in the cities where people have more money to support their children. In the countryside, the conditions grew worse. To get into one of the good universities supported by the government, you need a high score in your entrance exams, but because education is so bad many students in the countryside score very low. Out of 300 students, only one or two are getting into government-supported universities. Meanwhile, the government have encouraged the building of privately run colleges all over China.
*Why are they a problem?*
Their only goal is to earn money – they don't care about anything else. They charge often three times as much for tuition as the good universities. The average income in the countryside is very low and families have to borrow money to pay the fees: some parents pay a lifetime's earnings to put one student through college, but the standard of teaching in the commercial colleges is very bad and when the students graduate, they can't find a good job.
*Will the film be shown in China?*
Not by the government media. But my films always leak in – someone will upload it to the internet, or an underground company will make DVDs and people in China will buy it. If someone in poverty watches this film, I hope it will make them realise that, if they've studied hard and worked hard and are still very poor, then the problem is in the system and not in themselves.
**CHRISTOFFER GULDBRANDSEN: STEALING AFRICA*
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*In spite of its vast copper resources, Zambia remains one of the poorest countries in the world. This documentary by Danish film-maker Christoffer Guldbrandsen (The President, The Road to Europe) shows how multinational corporations are exploiting Africa's mineral wealth and giving very little in return.*
*There has been a lot of excitement recently about an economic boom in Africa. Do you feel there's another side to the story?*
Yes I definitely do. Everybody can see there's growth in Africa in traditional terms but there's also growth in inequality, which feeds into poverty. It also appears that it's not a very healthy form of growth: in many countries it is based on extraction of unrenewable resources, and when the resources are used up there'll be no more growth unless alternative industries have been created and infrastructure and education are strengthened. This is obviously not happening in Zambia. They're still dealing with a lot of the same issues they were 10 years ago, despite being very resourceful in terms of copper which has more than quadrupled in price over the same period.
*Who's to blame?*
I think it's a global systemic problem and it's born out of the idea of deregulation: if we just let the free hand of the market rule, even in places like Africa, it will sort out all the problems. But the problem with Africa is that there are so many factors, such as corruption, that make it impossible for the market to regulate itself.
Zambia desperately needed foreign investment to develop their copper mines, but privatising the mines and selling them indiscriminately, with such a lack of regulation, was not the best way to go. It is almost ironic that they sold the Mopani copper mine, which I feature in the film, to a consortium led by Glencore, whose founder had to flee the US in what was at the time the biggest ever tax-evasion case in US history. Those are the guys they're selling their family silver to. It questions the validity of the idea that the free hand of the market will sort it out, because it's not always free and it's not always playing by the book.
**BRIAN HILL: FOUR BORN EVERY SECOND**
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*Four Born Every Second, directed by Brian Hill (Feltham Sings, The Not Dead), takes a look at infant mortality around the world and highlights the disparities that exist between – and within – three very different countries: America, Cambodia and Sierra Leone, one of the worst places on earth to be born.*
*Why did you decide to make this film?*
Infant mortality is a subject that doesn't get covered very often, and it's a very visible example of the effects of poverty. It's a simple equation: if you're poor, your chances of surviving are very limited compared to if you're rich. And of course that's not just to do with the country you're born in: we know that people within rich countries like America get a bad deal too.
*Was it difficult to make?*
The research took a long time. To start with, you've got to figure out which countries to go to. The worst country in the world to be born at the moment is Afghanistan, but it's so atypical and it's in a war situation so it's probably not a good idea to go there. After taking practical considerations on board, and with huge help from Unicef, we decided to go to Sierra Leone, which is one of the worst places.
*Were you shocked by what you saw there?*
On the very first day in Sierra Leone we saw two stillborn babies. That was quite bracing. I get asked a lot about how things like that affect me, but it kind of balances with the great things you're seeing. In Sierra Leone we were treated with incredible kindness and generosity, and the village where our subject, Hawa, lives felt like a real community.
*Where did you see improvement, and where did you see things getting worse?*
We only spent a short time in each place so it hard to make generalisations, but we wanted to go to Cambodia because it is improving. Maternal mortality has decreased by 58% between 1990 and 2009. That's largely due to healthcare provision being extended to poor people, but it's still the case that only 44% of births are attended by skilled medical practitioners. The problem with statistics is that they're so hotly debated, but some people think it's gotten worse in America. Others think it's gotten a little better – but it's still bad. America is one of the worst places to be born in the developing world.
*Did you get a sense of why that was?*
It's complicated. It's partly to do with poverty, the fact that there are now so many people living beneath the poverty line in America without access to the same levels of health service as people with insurance. But it's also to do with the over-medicalisation of birth in America, and partly to do with obesity and poor health. The high rate of teen pregnancies is another factor.
*What do you hope to achieve with the film?*
We tried not to make it relentlessly miserable, and I hope people will take some kind of hope from it. But I also hope it will shock, and that people will send money to Unicef and Medicins Sans Frontiers. And that people will think about the plight of a lot of people in the world and do something about it.
**HUGO BERKELEY: LAND RUSH**
*As millions of acres of farmland in Africa are being bought up by corporations and foreign governments, Hugo Berkeley (A Normal Life, The Market Maker) and co-director Osvalde Lewat (Sderot, Last Exit) investigate a large-scale agricultural development project in Mali that promises to enrich the impoverished local community, but at the expense of an ancient way of life.*
*What inspired the film?*
I made a film in Ethiopia a couple of years ago about small-scale farming and agricultural development, so I was very interested in that subject, and I'd noticed a huge expansion of land purchasing in Africa since 2008. After reading about Mali, I thought it would make a fascinating subject for further investigation, particularly the Office du Niger region, which seemed to have such a rich variety of different forces vying to control it.
*The film closely follows the heads of a project called SoSuMar, which was trying to clear space for massive sugar cane plantations in the Office du Niger. What was the most compelling argument in favour of the project?*
The best argument was that economic development was going to bring money and modern conveniences – running water and electricity, education and healthcare – into communities where they simply didn't exist. A lot of people don't have enough money to pay for healthcare, and the idea of jobs to keep children of elder farmers on the land was a big one. But there was a sizeable portion of the population who wanted to maintain their traditional lifestyle and didn't want to be moved off their land, and that created a very fundamental divide.
*Why do you think the film was important to make?*
Because agricultural development is one of the most important issues for poverty in Africa. So many people are involved in farming and yet the way forward for farming is very unclear. So I think trying to understand what the benefits of large-scale and small-scale development are, and how they can be united, is a big challenge for alleviating poverty in a systemic way in Africa. I hope that dealing with the subject in a non-ideological way will allow more people to experience both sides of the argument. Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.