- Global Voices - https://globalvoices.org -

Philippines: Storytelling for Hunger Awareness

Categories: East Asia, Philippines, Singapore, Citizen Media, Economics & Business, Environment, Food, Health, Youth
Image by Mr. Kris [1]

hunger

A few years ago, a short film won the public's  approval at the 56th Berlin International Film Festival, and to this day, it is still making its rounds through internet, raising awareness on poverty and hunger.  Chicken Ala Carte by Ferdinand Dimadura is one of the videos we bring you today about hunger past, present and future.

The following video is available at Culture Unplugged [2] a website promoting documentary videos, shorts and mobile films, as well as rewarding the most popular ones with cash prizes. Chicken A la Carte [3] is 6 minutes long and its visual nature makes it cross language barriers without a hitch:

View this movie at cultureunplugged.com [4]

Many as children heard our mothers tell us to finish the food on our plate, as there were children starving in other areas of the world: the truth is that the starving children may just be around the block from us.

This next video by CarolinaMed [5] warns about the injustice stemming from wasting or throwing away edible food and includes numbers regarding how much is wasted from a single specific first world country, and how many people would benefit from that thrown away food.

And from Singapore, azahahasupernova [6] poses the question: What is your excuse for wasting food, and gives ecological reasons of why it is harmful for the environment.

In the Philippines, hunger is not recent: there are myths based upon the need to find food to stave off hunger: such is the case for the following short, an animated film made in watercolors. Animator tokomokolika [7] tells us a bit more about it:

A Bontoc story about a tree that used to stand near Lake Danum near Sagada. This is a mythology story about a woman named Maeng, and her quest to save her family from hunger.

It is an adapted story from Damiana Eugenio's collection of Philippine Mythologies. In the book, the protagonist is nameless, and the name of the village she came from was Maeng.

Thumbnail image used is Give us This… by Mr. Kris [8]