For a better karma!

“I hate Romania: this is where everything bad happens”, so told me a kid. And he added: “I saw that on TV”. Since the last edition of One World Romania, the amount of hate and intolerance per square meter has exponentially grown. Our karma is broken... Abused - just like the kid – by this state of mind, we decided that the 6th edition of our festival will go against the tide (yet again). The program,
put together with Adina Bradeanu, tries to be an antidote to hate and anger.
This is why we precede the festival with a special event dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust, the most vicious manifestation of hate in recent history. (Since, in Romania, memory is short and partial, we take the films about the Holocaust to teachers and students: only they can start to remember what their parents and grandparents tried so hard to forget). That’s why we carefully chose a few powerful films about people with so-called disabilities; instead of rejecting them because they’re different, maybe society will learn to accept them. That’s why we’ll screen a dense selection on manipulation and mass-media, because – often – the toxins spread through these channels. We talk about skewed laws and how to stand up to them every day, about a sick health system, about how to cure the city and about the troubles of adolescence... And because teens seem less contaminated by evil, we decided to hand them the wheel: a jury of high school students will give, for the first time, an award at One World Romania.
We talk about all this through cinema, in a manner only cinema can speak. Through many of the films of the 6th edition, runs an underground wave, a common denominator: where should the documentarian sit in relation to the world and how should he act so that he won’t ruin his karma (even more). Jon Bang Carlsen, the hero of our retrospective section, has been working on this for a lifetime.
And no, we have not become Buddhists. Yet, we believe that, by watching together, in the darkness of the cinema, these documentaries that come from far away – we’ll be able to move past our troubles here. Come to the film and please smile, even if you have tears in your eyes. When you’ll go out on the street, everything will seem brighter.

Alexandru Solomon