2010 Festival Themes: A Message From the Director

From the Director

Sometimes common themes emerge from the ten films selected to “celebrate films that promote the common good,” and that’s the case this year.  In a variety of ways, the films explore the experience of strangeness and the possible consequent, estrangement. 

Our opening film perhaps exemplifies the theme best.  What would it be like to be ripped from what we have always known, and plunged willy-nilly into a totally alien world in which we understand no one, and no one understands us?  In such a situation, what are the necessities of life?  Communication?  Positive relation?  Hope? 

Or consider the situation in Fraulein:  into an ordinary but somewhat bleak working environment comes an immigrant worker.  She becomes a catalyst, revealing the estrangements that already exist, and countering them toward transformation—but at what cost?

Estrangement already exists in The Lemon Tree as two strangers become neighbors in Israel’s settlement program.  Whose good is served?  And again, at what cost?  And can these strangers-become-neighbors offer signs of hope in the midst of hopelessness?

The theme is not confined to these three films, and I invite you to explore its manifestation yourself in the other seven films of the 2010 festival series.  The films will draw you into cultural situations that differ in a variety of ways from our accustomed American scene—Pakistan,  Argentina, Israel, Rwanda, Japan, the Bahamas, Canada, Germany.  Sometimes we, the observers, are the strangers to these scenes.  But the films tell us that estrangement does not necessarily follow.  We share the human situation explored in each film, and as happens in most of these films, we can reach across the seeming divide with deeper understandings of others and ourselves, toward a more common good. 

 Welcome to the journey.

~Marjorie Suchocki
Director, Whitehead International Film Festival