Oxfam

Produced by the Luang Prabang Film Festival, "MEKONG 2030" is a collection of short narrative films that envision the future of the Mekong River from five different national and cultural perspectives. Set in the year 2030, they aim to both entertain and inspire audiences to actively protect this critical life source.

On June 21 2007, the Howard Federal Government launched an intervention into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. It was one of the most dramatic policy shifts in the history of Aboriginal affairs. Relentless media attention focuses on ideological arguments for and against the Intervention, while the voices of those affected by the policy are rarely heard. For this film more than 40 Alice Springs town camp residents were interviewed in depth over the course of eight months to find out the answer to the question - is it working?

In Zaatari, Jordan – one of the world’s biggest refugee camps – Maamun owns a little shop: a small white container aligned in a seemingly endless row of identical containers. There he repairs mobile phones of the numerous Syrian refugees. They are anxious to retrieve the devices’ content which consists of memories from the past, a time when the war had yet to begin and they were not yet refugees but just ordinary people. Maamun and his friend Karim invent a new way to satisfy their customers: they buy a printer to print the photos, allowing the camp dwellers to retrieve some of their identity. The film provides an insight into the daily goings-on in a refugee camp.

In the Indigenous and Afro Mexican communities of Oaxaca’s Coast, the future is played out in the realms of ritual and politics: water rituals, fishermen’s daily struggles and the constant threat to communities of the Río Verde make life hang in the balance delivered by water’s fate.

The assassination of Berta Cáceres shook the world on March 2, 2016. Mexican activist Gustavo Castro, a witness to the crime, survived the horror of that night and was trapped in Honduras. The defense of the river Gualcarque, sacred to the Lenca people, against the installation of a hydroelectric plant, is the preamble of a story in which we follow Garifuna leader Miriam Miranda, friend and companion of Berta. Their struggle for decolonization is the same, in a country that is sold to transnational capital and takes lives in many ways.