The Power of Words: Peace Counts Features On Stage

 

The Peace Counts project features and how they came to be: Tilman Wörtz of Zeitenspiegel and Soran Assef of the Phoenix Puppet Theater will introduce a showing of the film "The Power of Words: With a Storyteller in Ivory Coast."

The event will be held Thursday, March 11 at 8:00 p.m. in the Galerien für Kunst und Technik located at Arnoldstr. 1 in Schorndorf, Germany (near Stuttgart).

The media profit from war: It brings higher ratings. The journalistic project Peace Counts seeks instead to focus on people working toward nonviolent solutions in crisis regions. The traveling photo exhibition "The Peace Builders" is currently on display in Schorndorf, accompanied by a program of educational workshops and evening events.

What works for crisis regions can certainly work for Schorndorf, the reporters decided. Journalist Tilman Wörtz of the Zeitenspiegel Agency will relate his experiences with the project in conflict zones. Soran Assef, an actor with Schorndorf?s Figurentheater Phoenix, will perform a dramatic reading of a feature that reported on meetings between Israeli and Palestinian youth in Israel.

In the past six years, the Peace Counts project has located and featured Peace Builders from Afghanistan to Cyprus - people who get involved on behalf of peace in regions scarred by war, from former rebel fighters who show young people how to escape their violent environment and priests who foster religious dialogue on the front lines to entrepreneurs whose businesses provide sustenance for people on both sides of a conflict.

They display courage, creativity, and persistence. They are role models, particularly for young people. But they receive much too little public attention.

Media are often part of the conflict. They may suppress important information or even falsify it. The journalistic network Peace Counts tries to counter that tendency, producing over 40 features to date on the little-known heroes of civil society and making them accessible to mass audiences via magazines such as Stern, Focus, and Sonntag Aktuell, along with public radio. As they conduct their research, the reporters' interest always centers on the same questions: What are potential ways to resolve conflict? What methods do Peace Builders use? What motivates them, and how do they overcome the routine problems that frustrate their efforts?

Last year in Ivory Coast, the Peace Counts project used local journalists and photographers for the first time. The resulting features were then performed by a professional storyteller on a nationwide tour that was specifically aimed at illiterate people in rural areas. Radio features were broadcast not only by the government station RTI but also by rebels - a cooperation unique in the years following the country's bloody civil war. A brisk and entertaining documentary film, directed by the Berlin filmmaker Matthias Luthardt, portrays the project?s Ivory Coast experience for audiences in Schorndorf and elsewhere.

In Africa, the tradition of the storyteller is still very much alive. Can it be revived in Germany? Soran Assef of the Phoenix Puppet Theater thinks it can. His wit and charm suggest to listeners yet another way of thinking about the Peace Counts project's central themes, showing how Israel and Africa, war and peace, can touch us all.