Haku Mo‘olelo

By EDWIN TANJI, City Editor
Most of Hawaii and the United States missed it. From about 8 a.m. to noon last Saturday, several million people around the world participated in a viewing of videos promoted by a woman filmmaker who believes that sharing cultures is a way of creating understanding.

In American media, the whole idea was treated with benign neglect.

The event was Pangea Day.

Except for a few scattered sites on Kauai, the Big Island and reportedly in Paia, no one in Hawaii apparently was told of it — not by American media.

It may have something to do with the person responsible.

Jehane Noujaim is an Egyptian photographer and videographer with a degree from Harvard University in visual arts and philosophy who offended Arabic viewers when she did a film on an Egyptian village whose residents lived by picking through garbage.

She had much bigger audiences to offend, though. Another film, “Startup.Com,” is a documentary on how the softening economy impacted Internet companies that had been soaring in paper wealth.

Then in 2004, she directed a documentary, “Control Room,” that examined the U.S. invasion of Iraq through the eyes of Al Jazeera, the Arabic television news operation based in Qatar. As an American videographer, Noujaim also gained access to U.S. Central Command, creating a film that presented the American intervention in Iraq from two perspectives — demonstrating the truth that there are two sides to every story.

In 2006, Noujaim was awarded $100,000 by the TED conference in support of her dream of having hundreds of filmmakers sharing stories about their lives, their societies, their cultures. She made a wish to bring together the stories as a way to achieve world peace.

“The first step to world peace is for people to meet each other,” she said.

Utilizing cyberspace, she proposed to have people around the world share stories in a single program “to cross borders to understand each other, to understand people’s hopes and dreams and to hear them laugh or cry . . . in a way that doesn’t involve having to get on a ship or an airplane.”

A competition resulted in 24 videos broadcast online as part of a four-hour Pangea Day program, along with talks and performances by a gathering as diverse as Queen Noor of Jordan; Oprah producer/reporter Lisa Ling; planetary scientist Carolyn Porco; Rwandan singer Jean Paul Sampulu; Israeli pilot turned peace activist Yonatan Shapira; child victim of war Ishmael Beah, forced to fight as a 12-year-old after his family was killed in the Sierra Leone civil war; and computer scientist Jonathan Harris.

Harris is producer of a Web site, “We feel fine,” that scans blogs and collects snippets of personal statements of feelings and images posted by the bloggers.

“What it really collects is human stories,” he said — and if more people would take time to collect the stories that others in their lives can tell, “we would all be much better.”

In four hours, there can be a great deal said about personal desires for global peace. Not much gets done.

Which was not Noujaim’s intent. She urges the audience to act on the connections they have made.

When an audience inspired by a common vision is scattered in discrete groups around the world, from Shanghai to Lebanon to Cairo to Mumbai to London to Los Angeles to Rio de Janeiro, making connections can be difficult. Or it can be as easy as being online.

At www.pangeaday.org, the results can be viewed in various forms. The site also urges action with links to organizations such as AVAAZ.org in support of Middle East peace talks; the United Nations Population Fund; and Witness.org, in support of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Although Sony Pictures Studio in Los Angeles was a host site for the online broadcast, the only reference to Pangea Day in the Los Angeles Times is a piece in the entertainment section. The Washington Post ran a brief. ABC had coverage but not other major U.S. broadcasting networks.

It may be Noujaim’s dream is just unrealistic.

It may be Noujaim won’t be taken seriously by mainstream media since “Control Room” had the audacity to suggest Al Jazeera is more honest in its reporting than American media. But Al Jazeera didn’t cover Pangea Day either.

• Edwin Tanji, city editor of The Maui News, can be reached at citydesk@mauinews.com. “Haku Mo‘olelo,” referring to a story writer, appears every Friday.