Our Island, Our World Film Festival

Our Island, Our World is both an annual Film Festival on Salt Spring Island and regular community showings of provocative films. The society uses film to foster awareness of justice, sustainability and development issues and then make the links between global and local concerns.

This group also has a listing of Salt Spring Island Community Groups.

Our Island, Our World Film Festival's mission is to “embrace hope, take action” in a world where global warming, AIDS, war, and corporate malfeasance could easily move us to despair. It is challenging to find a full weekend of documentaries that cover as many issues as possible while uplifting the human spirit and moving one from hopelessness over the state of the planet, to action on its behalf. Several films we showed this season come to mind.

Bonnie Sherr-Klein’s film Shameless: The Art of Disability, takes the subject of disability and turns it on its head. Klein, a pioneer in women’s filmmaking, suffered a stroke in 1987. Returning to her former profession with a new window on the world, this film is a poignant triumph of art as transformation for five inspiring individuals.

Sound of the Soul: The Fez Festival of World Sacred Music is another film that lifts the human spirit. Prompted by the Persian Gulf War in 1990, the music festival in Fez, Morroco, brings together musicians from Muslim, Jewish and Christian traditions, and celebrates human interconnectedness through the richness of music at a time when these religious traditions are most polarized.

Standing on the mezzanine the weekend of the film festival, watching all the people milling about the colourful social justice bazaar and talking about the films they’ve just seen is in itself uplifting. From our opening night, which features upbeat local music prior to the evening’s film, to announcing festival favourites on Sunday afternoon, the Our Island, Our World Film Festival is a celebration of our community in action, inspired by the art of filmmaking.

We will add these two films as well as the 2007 top ten favourites to Saltspring Library’s growing film festival collection. (Search the library website for “film festival” for a list of titles.)

Carol Grier and Richard Grier have coordinated the festival since 2005.