Human Rights Watch International Film Festival

by Adrienne Wilson on

Last week or so I made a promise to start posting on more film festivals and I will live up to that promise as best as possible starting with today’s find. The Human Rights Watch International Festival is a traveling film festival running from September 2006 to May 2007 which showcases feature films and documentary that stimulates heated and passionate conversation about human rights. In other words, if you’re seeking mind-numbing movies head towards your local AMC. The films being showcased are about hardships faced by Ethiopia’s coffee farmers, conversations with South African people & refugees, touring former German concentration camps and living near them. Spanning from almost every continent there is plenty of food for thought at this fest. See all the film descriptions here.

As of right now the Human Rights Watch International Festival is showing in Fresno, CA and Claremont, CA and will begin showing on Oct. 19th in Portland, OR and Nov. 14th in Troy, NY all until November 2006. Check for exact dates and venue information on their website: http://hrw.org/iff/

Slum Tourism

by Erik Olsen on

Having produced one of their very first travel pieces, I was very pleasantly surprised to see the recent deal between Current TV and Yahoo. Good for them. I have to confess that I rarely watch Current on channel 102 here in NYC, since so many of the pieces are agonizingly hard to watch, especially if you’re like me and don’t really like hip-hop all that much. That said, there are many gems among the hours of programming they feature, and I’ve always hoped they’d do a deal with someone like Yahoo or Google so you could select and watch specific pieces that get rated or passed around on the Web. So here’s kudos to Current and hopes that they keep on gong strong.

And here’s to Current as well for doing a great little story on Slum Tourism. When I was in Bombay, India two years ago, I made a special trip as a journalist to the Dharavi slums on the outskirts of town. This was a soul-slapping experience. The rancid sprawl of this slum, Asia’s largest ,went on forever and ever, as if it was a rank, wrecked city all to itself. And amazingly, while I was there interviewing one of the city’s administrators about the state of the slum, I ran into several tourists, walking around and shooting photos of people who lived in the slum. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but what I saw was exactly what they talk about here: slum tourism.

Is this an awful sign of the growing divisions of wealth in the world or an unsurprising reflection of human nature … that is, there have always been forms of slum tourism around, where the rich leave the comfy confines of their lives to “see how the other half lives.” I tend to believe the latter, but I could be wrong.

Placeblogger

by Erik Olsen on

Two of our newest blogs here at WIN are dedicated to a specific place. bloggingohio is all about Ohio and Bloggingneworleans covers the Big Easy. The idea of blogging about a single locale is certainly not new. Brooklyn alone has got hordes of bloggers who focus on the quirks of the NYC borough. But as these types of sites grow, wouldn’t it be great to have a place that organizes them for us, and helps you find what you need in a particular town? Well, according to Adam Glenn over at Poynter, there soon will be.

A new site called Placeblogger.com (not yet avail as it is under construction) is coming from Lisa Williams, also the host of a popular blog called H20Town, that covers everything happening in Watertown, Mass. According to Glenn, Williams showed off her imminent creation to the folks at the Online News Association and their Oct. 5 Citizen Media Summit.

For travelers, I can really imagine how useful a site like this would be. If you were heading to a place where there was an avid blogger, who could be a better resource for you than someone who is so passionate that they spend time blogging about it?

Photo of the Day (10/10/2006)

by Erik Olsen on

I reached back a bit in the gadling Flickr site to find this Photo of the Day. The shot is captioned From the Bridge of Sighs and comes from the collection by Lost in Place. Through the little gaps there, you can just glimpse one of the canals of Venice, which I like. The perspective here is rather unique, I think, and the shot expresses some originality in composition and texture.

Double Tall Skim Catpooccino To Go

by Iva Skoch on

If you’re a coffee lover, maybe you’ll want to make a special flight on Japan Airlines to buy “the rarest coffee in the world“: civet coffee. But this specialty brew is sold only in business class, to the tune of $600 for 100 grams.

You’re not going to find this in any Starbucks. Your other options for getting the coffee are limited: if you’re not heading to Japan, a single coffee shop in Vienna sells the beans. If you’re really adventurous, maybe you can sniff out the source directly: the Philippines. An environmentalist husband and wife team, named Reyes, has made a multi-million-dollar business out of its harvest. Non-coffee drinkers themselves, they accidentally stumbled into the civet’s special gift while doing conservation work on sugar palm trees outside of Manila in 2003.

What makes the coffee so rare? It’s made from the droppings of the civet cat. Apparently, this nocturnal, ferret-like cat eats sugar palm fruit and coffee cherries. (Oh, and you can catch SARS from it too.) The coffee bean is not digested, but ferments in its digestive system and is excreted, much to the delight of locals, who collect the ready-to-roast beans, but try to keep the origin secret. The roasted beans give off a “sweet chocolatey aroma” and produce a “strong and earthy” brew.

Ah, I can just imagine the aroma!