Watch an Exclusive Online Screening of Women, War & Peace on Thursday at 4:30PM PT

On Thursday, September 29, 4:30PM PT / 6:30PM CT / 7:30PM ET— ITVS Community Cinema, Ladies Home Journal, THIRTEEN, and Fork Films will present an exclusive online preview screening of Women War & Peace on ITVS’s Livestream channel in advance of its television premiere on PBS. The film is the first broadcast in ITVS’s Women and Girls Lead initiative.

On Thursday, September 29, 6:30 PM CT, ITVS Community Cinema, Ladies Home Journal, THIRTEEN, and Fork Films will present an exclusive online screening of Women War & Peace on ITVS’s Livestream channel in advance of its television premiere on PBS.

The screening will be followed by an online panel discussion with producer Abigail E. Disney and director Gini Reticker. Online participants will receive an opportunity to ask questions and discuss their reactions to the selected scenes with the filmmakers to learn how women, despite suffering unprecedented casualties, are simultaneously emerging as critical partners in brokering peace and as leaders in forging new international laws governing conflict.

The half hour online screening will feature Women, War & Peace Episode 3: Peace Unveiled. When the U.S. troop surge was announced in late 2009, women in Afghanistan knew that the ground was being laid for peace talks with the Taliban. Peace Unveiled follows three women who immediately began to organize to make sure that women’s rights don’t get traded away in the deal. Narrated by Tilda Swinton, Peace Unveiled premieres October 25, 2011 at 10 PM ET on PBS.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Colombia, Empowerment, girls, international, leadership, Liberia, PBS, peace, war, women

ITVS Introduces Women and Girls Lead, a Public Media Initiative

By Sally Jo Fifer

ITVS President and CEO Sally Jo Fifer announces the Women and Girls Lead campaign — a major public media initiative that uses independent films to focus, educate, and connect audiences in support of women and girl’s leadership and development around the world.

It’s no secret that the competitive sea in which ITVS and independent filmmakers paddle is not getting any calmer.  Over the last year, more than 1,000 proposals came to us for funding.  The Sundance Film Festival received 841 documentary submissions.  Public broadcasting is grappling with marketplace and demographic challenges. New metrics and “theory of change” frameworks have shifted foundations’ approaches to individual films. The public clicks like crazy between 120 television channels and 300 million websites vying for their attention — and that same public flunks miserably at any basic test of civic knowledge.
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Tags: education, girls, international, ITVS, leadership, PBS, public media, women

Live Webcast: Media As Global Diplomat

It’s here! Welcome to the live stream of Seizing the Moment: Media and Peacebuilding, a summit we’re hosting at the Newseum in cooperation with the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and the Sesame Workshop. (For more about this event, check out our previous post)

Please join in via chat or by using the Twitter hashtag #magd. How do you think the media is doing in helping divergent cultures understand and empathize with one another? Is technology delivering on its promise to democratize media in a true sense? What could we be doing better?

Dive in and be heard:

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Tags: international, leadership, media, peace, public policy

Building Peace through Media – Join Us Tomorrow, May 12th!

We’re thrilled to once again be partnering with the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) to host the third in a series of media and leadership summits, tomorrow May 12^th at the Newseum in Washington D.C.  So you’re not in D.C.? No worries – we’ll have a live webcast and discussion here on the blog beginning at 9:00 AM EST.

You’ll able to engage panelists through a live chat and Twitter (#magd). We encourage you to take part! Sign up and find full details of the event at www.usip.org.

The summit, Seizing the Moment: Media and Peacebuilding, will be moderated by NPR’s Michel Martin, host of the acclaimed program Tell Me More, and will bring together more than 20 thought leaders, CEOs, media makers, and policy gurus to tackle the tough questions around leveraging today’s global media to facilitate conflict resolution and contribute to the expansion of peace.

The summit will present a series of three discussions (The New News:  Media at the Crossroads, Storytelling 2.0: Keeping it Real,Opening Minds, and Changing Hearts, and Next Generation Peacebuilders) alongside select content from new documentaries coming to PBS and other outlets, including the Academy® Award-nominated The Most Dangerous Man in America and Project Kashmir airing on Independent Lens on May 18th.

The day’s panelists include:

• Jared Cohen—Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, U.S. Department of State
• Patricia Harrison—President and CEO, Corporation for Public Broadcasting
• Marvin Kalb—Veteran Broadcaster and Visiting Expert, USIP
• Riz Khan—Senior  News Anchor, Al Jazeera English
• Gary Knell—President and CEO, Sesame Workshop
• Mir Ibrahim Rahman—CEO, Geo TV Pakistan

Please tune in and add your voice to this important conversation.

Tags: international, leadership, media, peace, public policy