Utopia In Ethiopia
People:
Paulina Tervo (Director, Producer)
Serdar Ferit (Co-director, Cinematographer)
Grants:
$20,000 for project development, outreach and engagement in 2011
About the Project
Despite $3 billion of foreign aid money pouring into Ethiopia every year, the country still remains one of the poorest and most undeveloped in the world. We believe it is time to stop waiting for outsiders to help, and look for the answers within.Utopia in Ethiopia is an interactive web documentary about Awra Amba - a small, Ethiopian village whose way of life has become a model for development, gender equality and democracy worldwide. Founded almost 40 years ago by an illiterate farmer, who had a vision of a better world, Awra Amba is a thriving self-help community, comprised of 400 people from different religious and ethnic backgrounds. They have come together with the common belief that there is a way out of poverty by making women equal with men, by working instead of praying and by discarding ancient traditional practices. With such remarkable results without any external help, Awra Amba receives thousands of curious visitors every year, who come to learn from their way of life.
The audience will be able to explore the fascinating village, its philosophy and inhabitants’ everyday lives through a truly interactive 360° experience. Twelve locations around the village can be visited, each of them with its own theme, ranging from education to health to gender issues. Twelve short films each tell a different story about Awra Amba, ranging from big philosophical questions to intimate, personal stories about love. Each film is connected with a specific topic and tagged with interactive links to fact sheets about the issue at hand.
In the first six weeks the audience will be able to interact with the community through social networks. Viewers can send in questions and the best ones, voted by the audience, will be taken forward to the community. The questions will be answered by the community members on a regular basis, and posted on the site’s own blog as well as through the project’s existing social networks. A community blogger will publish regular updates about their way of life.
The audience can support social action projects set out by the community themselves, depending on what project is currently active in the village (such as construction of a school or buying fair trade merchandise made by Awra Amba.) The project will also have an educational side. Using the web documentary as a basis for learning, they will develop thematic classroom materials for primary and secondary curricula.