Worldwide day of film to be held Saturday

Every year the TED Prizes are given to three people with wishes, along with $100,000 each to make them happen. In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim was a winner. Her wish: to bring the world together through film. That may sound a little facile, a bit like an Academy Award montage, or some teenagers posting their first YouTube video.

But Noujaim (who was not available to take a call) was thinking literally -- a global film festival held in multiple cities and broadcast around the world.

The result is Pangea Day, a four-hour multimedia event this Saturday hosted from six cities, including Los Angeles, and beamed to TVs, cellphones, and computers in more than 100 countries (in the United States, it will be televised on Current, and you can also watch on the Pangea Day site.)

The event, named after the land mass that spanned the earth before the continents split, combines old-media reach and celebrity power with new-media style. It's also hitting at a time when artists are finding it increasingly difficult to get noticed on sites once touted as democratic, and when global conflict thrives online. (Where would “Fitna” be without YouTube?)

“All of our problems are global — climate change, poverty, terrorism,” said Chris Anderson, curator of the TED conference — that’s for technology, entertainment and design. “We can actually use modern technology in a much more imaginative way than has been tried before, to bring the world together.”

To do that, filmmakers were asked: if you had the world’s attention for five minutes, what story would you tell? Thousands of submissions came in, from the professional to the amateur, filmed on cameras and on cellphones, and ranging in tone from the whimsical to the dramatic. Twenty-four selected films, most about five minutes long, will air, punctuated by commentary from hosts, guests such as Queen Noor of Jordan, anthropologist Donald E. Brown, and journalist Christiane Amanpour, and audience reactions.

“We’re making cinema a group experience rather than a solitary one,” Anderson said, imagining the audience as a community of “global souls.” “There are lots of people who are passionate about this idea, who are sick of the tedious small-minded head-butting that dominates so much of our media conversation, punctuated only by celebrity titillation.”

Two of the familiar faces of Pangea Day are of the non-head-butting kind. Hosts Max Lugavere and Jason Silva say they were immediately drawn to the project because it shared the social consciousness and multimedia savvy of their day jobs -- hosting programming on Al Gore's Current TV.

“There’s no point of view or agenda or partisan take,” Lugavare said. “Even Live Earth, which is an amazing event, had a pro-environment take, and not everybody is pro-environment, unfortunately. Pangea Day is about human universals -- love, safety, understanding, connection.”

Also unlike Live Earth, Pangea Day's emphasis isn't on marquee-name artists performing their green credentials. Instead, they’re lending wattage to lesser-known filmmakers in a way that those artists couldn't get by simply posting their work online.

“The real celebrities are these storytellers,” Anderson said.

Anderson seems aware of how “Kumbaya” it all sounds, and of how the event may simply be preaching to the converted.

“It’s not like we rolled out a $100-million marketing campaign or anything. It’s an idea we’ve put out there. To have a day when these global souls get visibility of each other, that’s a huge deal,” he said, noting that organizers hope to hold another Pangea Day in 2009, and annually thereafter. “It’s certainly ambitious and maybe unrealistic, but I take the view that you have to try.”

-- Swati Pandey

Photos courtesy of Getty Images and Max Lugavere and Jason Silva. And here's the Pangea Day trailer: