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Australian Jesuit Fr Michael Kelly has been appointed as director of the Bangkok-based Asian Catholic news agency, UCAN. He will continue serving as executive director of Church Resources, a communication project of the Australian Jesuits.
Fr Kelly will be sharing his time between Australia and Bangkok next year, as he continues in his roles for the Australian Jesuit Province and for Church Resources while taking over the direction of the Union of Catholic Asian News group.
"I'm looking forward to learning and sharing," said Fr Kelly.
"There's a lot we can learn from the fastest changing region in our world, and there's a lot we can bring to it given Australia's technological developments over the last decade particularly in relation to the web."
UCAN was launched in 1979 to provide information on the Catholic Church and Catholic concerns in the Asian region. It is the largest Catholic news service in Asia and one of the biggest in the world.
Since entering the Society of Jesus in 1971, Fr Kelly has worked extensively in the media, first as a journalist and then later as founder and CEO of a number of media organisations. He co-founded Albert Street Productions in 1986, and established Jesuit Publications (publishers of Madonna, Australian Catholics and Eureka Street) in 1989. In 1998, he was appointed founding Chief Executive Officer of Catholic Telecommunications (renamed Church Resources in 2002). In 2004-2005, he was instrumental in establishing (and is now director of) Aurora Community TV on Foxtel, the first national community channel where the Catholic Church plays a prominent role.
As well as his experience in traditional media, Fr Kelly will bring to UCAN extensive experience in harnessing new technologies.
"The Church's mission is to reach out to people where they are with the message of Jesus, in a way that's relevant and applied to their lives. The access to the web for many people across Asia is through hand held devices. That represents a completely new challenge in communications, and it's one that I look forward to exploring and responding to in coming years," Fr Kelly said.
Australian Provincial Fr Steve Curtin has made Fr Kelly available for the new role from January 1 2009. He congratulated Fr Kelly on the appointment, which he said provides great opportunities for the proclamation of the Gospel.
"The appointment places great trust in Michael and in the Australian Province," said Fr Curtin.
The 2nd Iñigo Film Festival was launched in Sydney on Wednesday, July 16, at the height of the World Youth Day celebrations. Sponsored by the Jesuit Conference of European Provincials, the festival included select short films from all over the world. As had the previous festival, this year’s focused on young filmmakers grappling with the spiritual dimensions of life. It honored films which reflect the spiritual yearnings and experiences of young people today that indicate the presence and/or absence of God in our modern secularized world or that take into account the twin dimensions of faith and justice.
“Iñigo Awards” were given to the three best short films, a first prize of $ 3,700, a second prize of $ 2,700, and a third prize $ 1,500. There were two additional Awards: one to a film chosen by the audience, “Audience Award”(non-monetary), and the “Fidel Goetz Emerging Film-Maker Award”, includes top-of-the-line professional editing software, FCP Studio Pro, and a travel stipend for the festival. Each prize is accompanied with additional professional software bundle by Showbiz (Hollywood).
The winner Mujo No Kaze, which means The Wind of Impermanence, by Dean Yamada explores the chilling pull of Japan's suicide club subculture. The themes of life, death, and friendship are presented with a poetic and spiritual reverence. The second prize went to Cocoon by Jeroen Bogaert. The film is about a dancer and how her body is the place of her passion and means of expression, but therein lies the problem that drives the film as she is confronted with a pregnancy that seems to threaten both. The third prize went to Blind (USA) by Nikkhil Pradash. How can God be among us? How can Jesus be our best friend? It is refreshing to see films that successfully make use of comedy to approach faith-based narratives. The „Fidel Goetz Emerging Film Maker Award“ went to an African film Le Tournant d’une Vie (The Turn of a Life), confronting the audience with the tough social reality of AIDS and the ethical conflicts of many Africans, the film raises into relief the themes of loyalty, love, and compassion. The Audience Award went to Judas' Pane, a Canadian animated film, in which the ostracized apostle seeks to redeem himself with Christ.
The program included 19 international films, selected from more than one hundred submissions, each of which explored the general themes City of God. Categories included narrative fiction as well as animated and documentary films. The festival's single theme cannot be said to have constrained the young filmmakers, as the submissions clearly proved with their at times thought-provoking, at times unsettling, at times funny and exciting approaches. The stories are set in all corners of the world, for example, in Sri Lanka, Burundi, Canada, Belgium, Korea, the Philippines, France, India, Japan and the U.S.
Why do Jesuits support the Iñigo Film Festival? Aren’t there enough already? In fact, it is not so easy for young film makers to find a public space for their films, especially those with spiritual and faith-based themes. TIFF offers the film makers a platform for their work and so also the Jesuits and the Catholic Church give young people and the public a signal, that faith enriches and fits in our modern world. In the end the festival demonstrates that it is not only in rituals, nature, and the encounter with others that God can be best sought and found but in film as well. As the late Pope John Paul II said, “[The cinema] offers an incomparable storehouse of expressive means for portraying the various areas in which the human being finds himself and for interpreting his inescapable call to the beautiful, the universal and the absolute."
The success of TIFF would not be possible without the great financial support of the U.S. Jesuit Conference, Jesuit provinces around the world, and other private and commercial contributors and foundations interested in religious film and other media for youth. The reactions of both the large audiences and the film makers themselves encourage festival director Fr. Christof Wolf, S.J. (Loyola Productions Munich, Germany) to continue with the „Jesuit Oscars“ (as some in the press call them), which will be held next time in Madrid in 2011 again in conjunction with the WYD. (www.tiffestival.org)
The Second International Conference on Religion and Media will be held in Tehran and Qom, Iran, November 9-12, 2008. We cordially invite all media researchers and scholars, representatives from diverse religious traditions, professionals and students involved with the subjects of the conference to attend and submit a paper. Further information could be found at conference website: http://www.religion-media.ir/_
A few scholarships are available to partially subsidize the costs of participants with selected papers.
Fr. Ari Dy is ending his term as Executive Director of Jesuit Communications in Manila. His successor is Father Nono Alfonso, SJ. During Father Dy’s time as head of the video and music production center on the campus of the Ateneo de Manila, the Philippine Province’s communication center has moved into new areas including producing programs for national broadcast television. Fr. Dy will begin a graduate degree in Chinese Religions.
The European Centre of Communication and Culture - ECCC (Warsaw, Poland) – will offer a training course from 1 – 7 May 2008. The course will be offered in Russian and is aimed at people responsible for the media policy of Christian institutions; creators of religious and social media who are looking for proved ways of supporting the mission of the Church through the media both in internal communication and in the public sphere. The course will cover the following topics: new possibilities offered by the modern media; what are the needs and situation of Christian communities and institutions;
interesting examples of new Christian media initiatives; how to search and build a network of collaborators; participants’ individual work on creating a new Christian media project for the needs of the institution they represent. Details about the course are available on the web-site: http://www.eccc.pl/en/upcoming-activities/the-media-at-the-service-to-the-church-place.html
Loyola Productions in Lusaka presented a six-part series during Lent on ZNBC national television. The 30-minute programmes documented the faith of various groups of Catholics in Zambia. The idea behind them was that every age group has the same general faith, that is Christian, but when you look more in detail at these age groups you see different aspects of the faith manifesting themselves.
The first programme showed children at a Jesuit parish in Kabwe where a young Zambian Jesuit priest has a keen interest in a Catholic children’s movement called the Holy Childhood. Through sort of a panel, a little skit, the Sunday Mass, catechism classes, traditional dancing, story telling, parents and teachers’ interviews and many individual children’s inputs we came up with a response to the question, “What is unique about a child’s faith?” Because children are children, the script provided a narration behind what the viewers saw.
The second programme highlighted a group of 9 young adults between 18 to 25 years old explaining their faith by means of a lively discussion. In the middle of the discussion we showed a play, which they acted out, demonstrating “poor Christian behaviour” and then the conversion of the “bad guys”. Segments of documentary footage that showed actual life situations accompanied the discussion.
The third programme was the Major Seminarians talking about their faith. This turned out to be 15 different seminarians, mostly in groups of three, discussing different topics; faith and priesthood, faith and academics, faith and prayer, and faith in the church. The fourth programme was the faith of four young adults who are married. These two couples disclosed what they believed and hoped. The fifth programme illustrates the faith of eight elders who told their personal. The sixth and final show focused on the resurrection in terms of what scripture says about Jesus rising from the dead, what people believe about people’s rising from the dead after they die; and what people believe about the resurrected life of Christ living in us today as we walk around this earth as human beings living the values of Christ. This programme featured people from all age groups.