by Jessica Mosby
-USA-

At the opening day press conference, Sundance Institute President and Founder Robert Redford proclaimed, “I love all of the films at this festival!” Eleven days of films later, I cannot agree more. This was a banner year for the annual Sundance Film Festival. There were great films and large audiences hungry to see something new and exciting. The presence of female directors was unprecedented. Previous Sundance darlings returned with their latest work while other directors made their festival debuts. I often found myself torn – schedule-wise – between seeing a film by a favorite director or venturing off into uncharted territory with a new face everyone was talking about.

by Faten Hijazi
-USA-

Growing up in California, my American identity has been constantly challenged. Strangers tell me to “go home” and call me oppressed, backwards, or uneducated. I have been spat upon, yelled at, and chased off the road. Why? Because I look different. I am a practicing American Muslim woman who chooses to wear a headscarf.

by Jessica Mosby
-USA-

Rarely does a film come along that floors you in its perfection and then continues to resonate for months after that first viewing. I saw the German film When We Leave at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival, where it won best film in the world narrative feature competition. When I entered the theater at Tribeca, I had no expectations about the movie. But two hours later I could not stop thinking and talking about what I had just watched. Writer, Director, and Producer Feo Aladag flawlessly couples the humanistic and thriller elements of filmmaking to create a cinematic force that makes you care about the characters while sitting on the edge of your seat fearful of what will happen next.

by Alexandra Marie Daniels
-USA-

The Lottery, one of two films about American public education to make the short list for the 83rd Academy Awards, gives hope that public awareness about the dire state of American education will continue to build.

The statistics that cross the screen at regular intervals during The Lottery are difficult to digest. Nationwide, 58% of African-American fourth graders are functionally illiterate and in Harlem, the neighborhood where the The Lottery takes place, 19 out of the 23-zoned public schools have fewer than 50% reading at grade level. Tragically, children who fall behind in elementary school are less likely to graduate from high school and more likely to end up in jail or juvenile detention.

High school dropouts are an economic loss to the entire country. As President Obama points out during the film, the achievement gap “costs us hundreds of billions of dollars in wages that will not be earned, jobs that will not be done, and purchases that will not be made.”

by Liz McGinn
-UK-

My eldest daughter is going to university in 2012. She is academically gifted and wants to study mathematics and French. She has no idea what she wants to do with her degree, but she wants to study subjects she enjoys and is good at. Her choice of degree course should open doors for her in years to come and give her a head start in the working world. Instead, she is heading for a potential lifetime of debt courtesy of the U.K.’s coalition government.

Beginning in 2012, students will be facing rises in tuition fees from £3,290 ($5,187 USD) per year up to a maximum of £9,000 ($14,190 USD). This means that a student on a typical three-year degree course faces tuition fee debt of £27,000 ($42,571 USD).

by Suad Hamada
-Bahrain-

Savatri used a condom for the first time in her life when she was forced into prostitution a few months ago. Fortunately, the 34-year-old Indian woman was instructed by the managers of the brothel to insist that her clients wear a condom - the only preventive method against sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including HIV, in use by sex workers in Bahrain.

Sex workers’ last hope for proper medical care was lost at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna last July when Bahrain officially declined to provide licenses to sex workers as a measure to reduce HIV/AIDS cases. Although sex work remains one of the risk factors in increasing HIV/AIDS rates, Bahrain rejected the proposal without hesitation out of fear of clashes with our conservative society, Dr. Somaya Al Jowder, head of the National AIDS Program, tells me.

by Leanne A. Grossman
-USA-

The Sumgayit Refugee Camp was nothing like I expected. Rather than mud-colored tents blowing in the wind, I encountered two half-painted cement structures surrounding a grey dirt courtyard. While it seemed a world away from Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, we had left Baku only 30 minutes earlier. A woman wearing a cobalt blue outfit is bending over a bathtub that serves as her washtub minus the running water. Her family laundry will soon be added to the clotheslines that wave overhead. Time has called Sumgayit “the most polluted city in the world” due to oil and chemical industrial exploitation of the Caspian Sea basin.

I came to Sumgayit Refugee Camp as a representative of a global philanthropy organization and was joined by Azerbaijani colleagues who arranged our camp tour. My goal was to see firsthand the conditions in which refugees lived and to speak directly with camp residents about their lives.

by Reem Abbas
-Sudan-

On January 9 citizens of South Sudan will begin voting in a week-long vote on whether they will secede from or remain united with the North. This referendum involves more than the yes or no vote. After decades of civil war, this referendum may have implications for people’s citizenship, safety, and the place they call home.

In 1995 Al–Jaaley arrived in Jabarona, an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp on the outskirts of Omdurman, where hundreds of thousands of IDPs from the South, the Nuba Mountains, and, recently, Darfur live.

Jabarona literally means “we were forced” in Arabic. It began as a direct result of the massive displacement caused by the civil war raging in the South. Jabarona is one of four official camps in Khartoum.

by Sarah Irving
-Australia-

Across the West Bank the sound of construction work seems incessant. The grind of diggers and the steady thud of pile drivers reverberate around cities like Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Nablus. The construction boom has been hailed by mainstream commentators like Bloomberg and Reuters, by the Palestinian Authority, and by the Israeli government as the sign of a resurgent West Bank economy.