After years of filming AIDS victims in Africa and the war in Iraq, Peter Jordan needed a change of subject. “I have been personally overwhelmed by the gravity of some of these people’s challenges,” the 29-year-old filmmaker says, and he feared he was too often moving his audiences to tears instead of inspiring them to act.
That’s when he heard about the East Palo Alto Boxing Club. Jordan, an MFA student in Stanford’s documentary film program, promptly took his camera to the club. A 17-year-old girl caught his attention. Abandoned by her mother, Fatima Alcantar grew up as a street kid in Mexico, fighting for food and survival. Her life changed for the better when, at 7, she was adopted by a family in Palo Alto. Yet she still harbored anger toward her biological mother and got into fights at school.
Three years ago she walked into the East Palo Alto Boxing Club and met coach Johnnie Gray. Like a real-life “Million Dollar Baby,” Fatima now fights for self-respect, discipline and the goals she sets for herself. Instead of attacking fellow students, she mentors young girls who want to take up boxing. “Fatima has shown me that life is what we make of it. Don’t just imagine your dreams, go out and conquer them,” says Jordan.
His short film, The Champ, is one of the 32 films selected for this year’s United Nations Association Film Festival (UNAFF), which celebrates its 10th anniversary October 24-28 at Stanford. The event is presented by the Stanford Film Society and the Midpeninsula chapter of the United Nations Association, a nonprofit organization supporting the ideals of the United Nations. (It is not tied financially or politically to the United Nations itself.)
“The festival was inspired by the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights—the most important declaration in human history,” says the festival’s founder and executive director Jasmina Bojic, a filmmaker, critic and lecturer at Stanford.
“Camera as Witness” is this year’s theme. “Our goal is to start a dialogue and to show people a side of an issue they aren’t familiar with,” Bojic says. Question-and-answer sessions with filmmakers after the screenings often provide even deeper insights than the films themselves. “We hope to affect people and inspire them to learn and think more. After all, ignorance is our worst enemy.”
Bojic started the festival at a time when documentaries weren’t as popular as they are today. The first festival in 1998 drew about 50 submissions; this year 370 films landed in Bojic’s mailbox, from countries as diverse as Mozambique, New Zealand, Spain and China. Twenty jurors—Stanford professors, film critics, students and members of the community among them—spent uncounted hours selecting the final 32 films. They will be shown at the film festival and at screenings in San Francisco, San Jose and East Palo Alto.
Even though the Academy Award winners The Panama Deception and The Blood of Yingzhou District and eight other Oscar-nominated films have been shown at UNAFF in the past, the festival remains friendly to novice filmmakers. The chosen documentaries range from the eight-minute The Journey of the Piano Tuner, about a child of the Vietnam War who found a new life in England, to full-length features such as Orange Revolution, a United States/Ukraine co-production focusing on the political protest in the Ukraine after the poisoning of presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko. Films about the environment also play a big role this year; among the selections are The Digital Dump, which deals with exports of electronics trash to Nigeria, and The Battle of Chernobyl.
The Champ is Peter Jordan’s second film accepted by the UNAFF. In 2005, he showed Speak Luvo, Speak Jane, about children growing up in communities devastated by AIDS in Kenya and South Africa. Jordan is excited about having his film shown not only at Stanford but also at the screening in East Palo Alto. “I would love for some little kid to come see this film and be inspired by what people are doing in his own backyard. I can’t think of a better use for the film than that.”
SIRI SCHUBERT is a freelance journalist in San Francisco. She recently completed a documentary about a Ugandan nonprofit that helps street children.
