Dordt College film professor and students work on a documentary on people living in poverty. It\u27s called  The Fourth World 

Volkers, Mark

English

Dordt College

Digital Collections @ Dordt Faculty Work Comprehensive List 10-2011 Putting a Face on the Facts Mark Volkers Dordt College, mark.volkers@dordt.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/faculty_work  Part of the Film Production Commons Recommended Citation Volkers, M. (2011). Putting a Face on the Facts. The Banner, 146 (10), 36. Retrieved from https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/faculty_work/9 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Collections @ Dordt. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Work Comprehensive List by an authorized administrator of Digital Collections @ Dordt. For more information, please contact ingrid.mulder@dordt.edu. Putting a Face on the Facts Abstract Dordt College film professor and students work on a documentary on people living in poverty. It's called "The Fourth World". Keywords poverty, film, documentary Disciplines Film and Media Studies | Film Production Comments http://www.thebanner.org/tuned-in/2011/09/putting-a-face-on-the-facts This article is available at Digital Collections @ Dordt: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/faculty_work/9 T u n e d  I nIN MY experIeNCe, reading statistics about poverty has a unique effect on people. It creates a slight rise in blood pressure as people read about “1 billion living in slums,” but then the effect dis-sipates as the enormity of that number—1 billion—seeps in. “I don’t know any of those people. It’s just a statistic, just a number,” we seem to tell ourselves.Wrapping our brains around some of the huge issues of the day is a struggle, especially when those issues are given to us in print. But what if we stripped away the glaze of statistics and got more vis-ceral, more real, more personal?That’s what some of my students and I have tried to do in making The Fourth World, a documentary produced by Prai-rie Grass Productions of Dordt College. We filmed individual slum dwellers in Guatemala City, Manila, Nairobi, Mum-bai, and Managua to help tell the stories of the “1 billion” people we sometimes hear about.In Manila we spent a week with a fam-ily who lives under a bridge near a garbage dump. They are José and Elvie Alquino, and their oldest daughter, Jovelyn, wants to be a nurse. In Nairobi, we filmed Felix, a 16-year-old boy who works eight hours a day for 17.5 cents an hour. In Guatemala City, Tanya begs at a busy intersection. Her story forever changed the film crew’s attitude towards beggars.It’s almost impossible for filmmakers—students or not—to come away from such experiences without being deeply moved. People who live in slums have names, dreams, aspirations, and personalities—just like we do. Working with Christian organizations in the areas where we filmed, we were able to zero in on indi-viduals, not statistics. Paraphrasing Chaim Potok, “the uni-versal is made known in the specific.” Documentaries can do an excellent job of telling specific stories to help us under-stand the macro-story.  n36    THE BANNER  |  October 2011  |  www.thebanner.orgPeople who live in slums have names, dreams, aspirations, and personalities.The LowdownMore documentaries that will open your eyes.Born into Broth-els: A photogra-pher gives cam-eras to children of brothel workers to help them document their lives and express themselves. (Think Film)R e p a r a n d o : Ministry in “La Limonada,” an enormous slum in Guatemala City, brings healing to people who had given up hope. (Athentikos)E m m a n u e l ’s Gift:  A young man in Ghana with a deformed leg bikes around the country to help raise awareness and build relation-ships in a culture that ostra-cizes those with disabilities. (First Look Pictures)Waste Land: An artist leads an art pro jec t  us ing mater ia ls  sa l -vaged f rom a landfill in Brazil. See a fuller review at thebanner.org. (New Video Group)putting a Face on the FactsMark Volkers is the digital media production instructor at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa. The Fourth World is in post-production. For more information, go to slumdoc.com or visit the “Slum Documentary Film Project” Facebook page.Mark Volkers and  Dordt student Pete Hessels (seated) of St. Catharines, Ontario, film a family living under a bridge in Manila.

Putting a Face on the Facts

https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=faculty_work

Putting a Face on the Facts

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