'Tis the season to see "Peace" on holiday cards -- and to reflect on the highlights of the past year.
One of the projects we were most honored to work on in 2014 was Three Short Films About Peace with director Errol Morris.
From Errol's introduction on the New York Times site:
DON’T WE ALL HAVE PICTURES in our heads about Nobel Peace Prize winners — who they might be, where they might come from? (This year’s Peace Prize winner will be announced on Friday.) For me, the subjects of these three films — the winners Leymah Gbowee and Lech Walesa, and the nominee Bob Geldof — challenged all such preconceptions. All three came from surprising, unexpected places.
Leymah Gbowee wanted to be a doctor. Instead, she ended up as an unwed mother, a refugee from blood-soaked Liberia, and doing the impossible. Like a modern-day Joan of Arc, she answered a vision, a call, and changed the world. Her efforts in the 2000s helped force the dictator Charles G. Taylor out of power and into the International Criminal Court at The Hague. (As her country has recently been ravaged by Ebola, she has warned that the epidemic threatens to unravel a decade of peace and has asked for an enhanced response.)
Lech Walesa, a shipyard worker and electrician in Soviet-bloc Poland, earned a reputation as an agitator and rabble-rouser in the 1970s for speaking out against Communist control of labor unions. Mr. Walesa was subjected to frequent firings and intense police scrutiny. But he was undeterred, continuing his fight for fairer labor laws — in particular, the right to strike — until it grew into something even he could not have expected: an independent political movement that became one of the nails in the coffin of the Soviet Union.
Bob Geldof grew up listening to the radio on the outskirts of Dublin, where his loneliness and resentment of prescribed drudgery manifested itself in an all-consuming desire to escape. It was an almost quintessential rock-star story — rebellion, transgression, fame, drugs, escapades, fading glory. That is, until he turned on the news one late-October evening in 1984 and saw a short story about a famine that moved him and changed his life. The next year, Mr. Geldof was in the Sahel region of Africa, overseeing distribution of the $140 million he and his fellow musicians ultimately helped to raise in one of the largest charity efforts ever organized.
Happy holidays, season's greetings, peace on Earth, and happy new year to all of you.