For Details Go Here.

Rice is Asia’s most deeply revered treasure. It is central to the Asian way of life; its culture, spirituality, traditions and norms. The staple food of three billion people, most of whom live in the Asian continent, Rice is Life to the people of Asia.

This precious rice heritage is, however, under threat from corporate/industrialized agriculture, neo-liberal globalization, private control of the rice seed, and genetic engineering of the rice genome. In addition, rice lands are being torn away from small rice farming communities in the name of “development” projects such as special economic zones, cash cropping, and agrofuel plantations.

Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific has for the last 17 years championed the food sovereignty of the grassroots, namely, farmers, agricultural workers, indigenous people and consumers and launched the SAVE OUR RICE CAMPAIGN in 2003. With like-minded and people-centred organisations, TVE Asia Pacific and Public Media Agency, we have collectively decided to put Asia’s Rice on film for the world.

Organised by
Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific (PAN AP), www.panap.net
Public Media Agency (PMA), Malaysia, http://publicmediaagency.net
TVE Asia Pacific (TVEAP), www.tveap.org

Details/Rules/Entry Forms Here

 Go here for a bank of relevant links to initiatives in developed societies that are useful to all facing the challenge of getting  children to be media and life-wise. Tell your friends.  (PMA eResources Project)

"Artistic Expression as a Spiritual Practice"

"Unfortunately modern, Western culture has largely emphasized the verbal and analytic in our educational processes and has removed the creative arts from everyday experience by professionalizing them. Consumerism further places value only on art that sells, rendering the focus on art-as-product or commodity. Unless we have been trained as artists, too often we shy away from engaging in the arts. Yet the process of art-making itself can be a path of discovery.

[...]The focus in the expressive arts is on the process of art-making rather than the art product itself. In this way, art-making becomes accessible to anyone, because the creative process is central to the journey of discovery, rather than what the final product will look like. The focus of the expressive arts is not on a specific technique or the quality of the product itself. It is on the power and process of symbolic expression in any of the arts for healing and integration.

The spiritual life, like the expressive arts, is largely about process rather than product. A dominant metaphor for spirituality is the journey, which evokes a sense of constant movement and progression. We never fully arrive but are always unfolding and discovering. Spirituality is also about a process of integration – of slowly bringing the whole of our selves and our experiences to our crafting of meaning. Engaging in the arts as a spiritual practice means honoring the process of meaning making, of cultivating a relationship to mystery." Source