James M. Wall

Empire builders don’t watch the right films. This became clear to me as I prepared several lectures that coincided with the 2004 U.S. presidential election. As is my custom in delivering lectures on most any subject, while I was writing, I was also looking for film clips to use, not to illustrate my lectures, but to offer material that would resonate with the theme of the current U.S. empire building project.

Peter Malone

Australian readers were recently asked to nominate their ten best Australian films. I thought I should make my list for myself. It included The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Gallipoli and, to my surprise, Muriel’s Wedding. To my further surprise, I discovered that Muriel’s Wedding topped the readers’ list. What was it about this comedy, both broad and subtle, that appealed to so many viewers? After all, wasn’t it just a popular entertainment about a gawky girl who desperately wanted to get married?

Maggie Morgan

Egypt is the only Arab country that can boast of a commercial film industry. When people speak of ‘Arabic films’, they are referring to Egyptian cinema. In spite of the centrality of the industry, as the following article reveals, cinema is not exempt from the familiar frictions between art and society.

Carlos A. Valle

Llama mucho la atención en estos últimos años la recepción y el reconocimiento tanto como las expectativas que se han creado en centros internacionales con la producción de jóvenes cineastas argentinos, teniendo en cuenta que provienen de una cinematografía que mayormente ha estado ausente del interés internacional. ¿Qué es lo que ha producido este cambio?

Philip Lee

The first public screening of a film took place in 1895, when Auguste and Louis Lumière hired the basement of Le Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, to show La Sortie des Ouvriers de l’Usine Lumière. That same year, one of the great comedians of cinema was born in the tiny settlement of Piqua, Kansas, USA.

Julia Helmke

The international church film organisation Interfilm will be 50 years old in October 2005. Why was it founded and how did it develop? Where did it succeed, where did it encounter difficulties? Fifty years is a long time for an international organisation that is exclusively voluntary and has neither permanent employees nor an office of its own. The following article gives an inside view of Interfilm, an organisation that always felt connected with WACC, but that nevertheless insisted on diversity and independence.

Hans Werner Dannowski

Interfilm has a new president as of April 2004. He is someone who had already contributed to the life of Interfilm for 15 years and who had expanded its work. When Hans Hodel was offered the presidency, he stressed that he would accept the office for a transitional period only, in order to give younger people the opportunity to grow into responsibilities and functions. The following affectionate words are offered in tribute to his commitment and work.

Karsten Visarius

We are ill prepared to make out the future. We only know that it will be different from how we imagine it today. Realising this, it is astonishing to observe the number of future prognoses, scenarios and development studies being published, discussed and used as the basis for decisions. This strange future certainty is a late descendant of a rose-tinted Enlightenment that believed in the power of reason in history – even if, in the meantime, many forecasts revealed a difficult, gloomy or catastrophic tomorrow. As always they are determined by hopes and fears, by desires and interests. And this also applies to the comparatively harmless question about the future of cinema.

Cinny Aste

The Ecumenical Jury at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival honoured British director Ken Loach for his more than 40 years work in television and cinema. ‘The whole of Ken Loach’s work shows that he is on the side of human beings who suffer but struggle; who have every reason to despair but still hope; who believe that solidarity and caring for each other are values capable of opening ways of hope.’ The citation indicates why his films have received a large number of prizes and commendations from juries at different international festivals.

Arturo Zamora

En 1980, pocos meses después del triunfo de la Revolución Sandinista y del derrocamiento de Somoza, se inició en la Central Sandinista de Trabajadores la primera experiencia de cine militante obrero. Ese proceso fue parte de las acciones desarrolladas por el Comandante ‘Modesto’ (Henry Ruiz) desde el Ministerio de Planificación, contó con el apoyo de Naciones Unidas y fue dirigido en su etapa de formación por el cineasta boliviano Alfonso Gumucio Dagron, a quien entrevistamos.

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.

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.

‘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.