Take One Action Film Festival 2011

The cynical among you may think Take One Action Film Festival is solely for agitated, veggie box ordering, be-sandled campaignistas; but this intelligently curated, audience engaging festival is so much more than that. Built around both high-quality documentaries and fiction films, this festival brings the best of storytelling and documentary film-making from across the globe to Central Belt audiences. Then it asks you what you think. Even for seasoned film festival goers the feelings and discussions the films in its programme provoke make Take One Action screenings unique experiences.

Now in its fourth year, the festival organisers like to focus their films around a triplet of key strands. The first of these, Land and Freedom, examines the ownership of our world’s natural resources. This fits well with the festival’s desire to make us look at the impact of our everyday choices and actions. And Blood in the Mobile will surely shake our incurious nature about the origins of our purchases. An edge-of-your-seat ride, Danish director Frank Poulsen draws the link between the child-exploiting, war ravaged mines of the Congo to the ivory towers of Nokia, with the audience left asking what the true cost of their need for the latest mobile gadgetry.

Green Shoots is the next strand focussing on the fight against climate change. Audiences can experience bike-powered film under the moonlight in Edinburgh’s Royal Botanical Gardens including Burning Ice featuring Jaris Cocker and KT Tunstall, and Homegrown, which shows how a family of five produced 6000 pounds of food a year in their back garden.

The final theme is Faces of Change, documenting how our world is changing. On this line there is a lot of buzz here around the Martin Sheen narrated doc The End of Poverty, which has been described as an ‘Inconvenient Truth for global economics’. Festival-goers will also be able to see behind the curtain of Burma’s plight in following the 2008 cyclone, with exiled Burmese activist Zoya Phan during and after the screening of Nargis: When Time Stopped Breathing.

Away from cinema screens, Take One Action’s fringe exists to explore campaigning and social justice issues in more depth. There is an opportunity to join Clare Short in conversation, (Filmhouse, 4 - 5.30pm, 24 Sep), develop your approach to reporting international developments (Edinburgh College of Art, 2 - 7pm, 28 Sep), and to learn campaigning for beginners in Glasgow or Edinburgh.

Like the issues it introduces to our screens, Take One Action Film Festival is becoming an annual event that is impossible to ignore. This year’s festival brings more films than ever to our screens and curious eyes. Everyone from the one-click slacktivist to the chained-to-a-fence campaigner will be satisfied with a programme packed with enough enthralling, universal stories to rouse us to take at least one action to make a positive change to this world.