16 Decisions & Dirt

Cambridge's Gayle Ferraro traveled to rural Bangladesh for her first video documentary, where she focused on a group of impoverished women who have been the beneficiaries of an enlightened loan program through Bangladesh's Grameen Bank. Each woman gets $60 to start up a business, and that meager money is apparently enough to spin her life around: financially, spiritually, and in terms of finding she actually has a voice. Ferraro also interviewed Dr. Muhammed Yunus, the former college professor who formed the Grameen Bank and is responsible for millions of dollars in loans to those whom regular banks (think Fleet!) would turn away. The Grameen also strives to steer its poor and uneducated customers toward a radically altered lifestyle, encouraging them to adopt a girl-scout-like "16 decisions" for a better existence, everything from vowing to boil water and build pit latrines to speaking out against dowries and child marriages.

In her voiceover, Ferraro notes that any kind of exercise besides sitting and standing is an unheard-of stretch for these women -- which helps explain why 16 Decisions is such a static watch. Still, it's hard to understand why the well-intentioned videomaker didn't shoot some of her women at their exciting new employments, with a Grameen Bank loan in hand. Also, she should have spent more time shooting her chief subject, a woman named Selina, on the most liberated day of Selina's pained, semi-slave life: going shopping with Ferraro at a town five miles down the road.

16 Decisions is paired with "DIRT: The Next Generation," a bouncy video short made locally, and collectively, by four teenagers who are part of the DIRT crew of 60, youth employees of the Lincoln-based Food Project. Each year, this group grow 80,000 pounds of organic vegetables and distribute the goods to homeless persons. This little video shows inner-city teenagers toiling in the fields, learning ecology and good citizenry as they work each Saturday for 42 weeks a year. Cool.

-- Gerald Peary