Twenty Films From the United Nations

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 525, 15 July 1949, Page 16

Twenty Films From the United Nations

(Written for "The Listener’ by

GORDON

MIRAMS

T is probably well enough known to some people, but should be worth repeating for the benefit of others, that the United Nations and, its specialised agencies’ by no rkeans_ confine themselves to issuing documents and producing reports, conventions, and agreements on paper, and circulating these round the world. They also from time to time produce films on celluloid and send them round the world, ‘too. Amid the many other activities of N and its agencies, this work of filmmaking and film-distributing may tend to be lost sight of; but it is in fact already being carried out on a large enough scale to entitle the UN to be com sidered as a major film production source -with- at least fourteen films already produced directly by, or under the sponsorship of, the United Nations and its agencies, and with another five or six about to be released. Alj this work is co-ordinated through the United Nations Film Board at Lake Success.

Unesco, with headquarters in Paris, does not itself possess production or distribution facilities, though it is the UN agency most closely concerned with stimulating ‘the making and interchange of films at the international level, as well as with many other aspects o the cinema. The twenty UN films referred to cover_a diversity of subjects ranging from afforesta-

tion and food, through illiteracy and juvenile delinquency, to lighthouses and maps. Some of them, of course, deal specifically with the set-up and functioning of the UN and its agencies; but all of them, in one way or another, show examples of the collaboration which is already going on between nations to-day, often in littlepublicised fields and to an extent which

the average person seldom _ realises. The films have been produced in nearly a dozen different countries; they are already being distributed in thirty-eight countries, and copies are being made in a total of eighteen languages. Here, for example, are the titles of the films which have been made on the subject of the United Nations itself-

that is, on the setting up of the organisation and the way it works: The People’s Charter, which is composed entirely of authentic documentary material and shows how, in the midst of war, the idea of UN was born; Searchlight on the Nations, which describes how the modern media of masscommunication are used to bring the reports of UN to the peoples of the world; The Defence of Peace, a French-made film explaining, largely by means of

(continued .from previous page) animated charts and drawings, how the UN and its organs are constructed and how they function; Clearing the Way, which deals-in -the human terms of children who have had to give up their former play-area among the rubbish-dumps-with the construction of UN headquarters on the chosen site in New York; Highlights of the United Nations Year, the contents of which are pretty well indicated by the title. The UN in Action : Then there are the UN films which, in a more detailed way, show the United Nations and its agencies in action in some particular sphere, or in the service of some special international project. One of them, indeed, has that very title-The United Nations in Action. It is an excellent Polish production telling the story of the International Children’s Emergency Fund and the UN Appeal for Children. Maps We Live By is a Canadian film about the importance of standardising cartography on a world scale and what has already been done in this direction; Keepers of the Light, which was made in France, concerns lighthouses and the international code to maintain safety at sea. The Eternal Fight shows co-operation, transcending national boundaries, to control and eliminate epidemic diseases (the stamping out of a cholera outbreak in Egypt not long ago was a notable case in point). Green Gold is a Swedishmade film about the world reforestation programme; That All May Learn, a Mexican production which uses the case-history of a farmer and his family to illustrate the need for world efforts to combat illiteracy; Under One Roof, produced in Great Britain, which demonstrates how people of different nationalities can work together on the basis of common skills and occupations -in this case, engineering. In Every Port, from the Netherlands, deals with medical and social care of merchant segmen and sailors of all nations; Battle for Bread is about the work of the field missions of the F.A.O. to increase the world’s food supply; and Juvenile Delinquency (from Belgium) attempts to show what is being done in the world to combat this problem. Academy Award Winner But this does not exhaust the list. Here are the titles of four others either produced by, or under the sponsorship of, the United Nations and its agencies -First Steps, which won a_ special

Academy Award in 1947 for its treatment of the subject of physically handicapped children; Hungry Minds, dealing with Unesco’s problems of educational and cultural reconstruction in Europe; The Nations Rebuild, which covers the whole period of UNRRA’s operation; and’ Mother, Child and Community, which has been. produced in India for the Social Affairs Department of UN and is intended for use in ‘recruiting and training social welfare workers. And finally, because it is probably still the most recent acquisition to this list, and also because it was a production in which Unesco was very closely concerned, special mention may be made here of This Is Their Story. Produced jointly by Unesco and the World Student Service Fund, This Is Their Story is a 20-minute documentary portraying student life and reconstruction in the war-devastated universities of Europe and Asia. Opening with scenes in an American college, where students ‘are meeting to raise funds for assisting Unesco’s work of educational reconstruction, the film goes on to illustrate actual conditions in war-torn centres of learning in various parts of Europe and the Far East.. All over the world, the universities are coming back to life again; but the process of revival is hard and painful. While the camera tells the pictorial story, voices of students of different nationalities describe. their way of life, their need for aid in many forms, and their own efforts to overcome war’s heritage of disease and destruction. There are glimpses of what is being done to counteract the very high incidence of tuberculosis among students in Greece, and at the International Student Sanitorium in Switzerland. Other sequences show a student rest centre in the French mountains, and the manner in which Polish students are often working all day and studying most of the night, under conditions of great physical hardship, in order to become the doctors, lawyers, teachers, and . administrators of to-morrow. Included in the film are scenes of reconstruction actiyity carried out on the international scale by Unesco and World Student Relief, emphasising the point that, though leadership can come only from the people themselves in the war-damaged ’ countries, they must be supported in their faith in an international future by material help from those who escaped relatively unscarred,