Students, faculty members and the general public had a chance to see the conflict between Palestine and Israel through the eyes of seven children who live in the violently divided region, in a documentary titled “Promises,” which was shown yesterday afternoon in the Jerome Library Pallister Conference Room.

The movie was shown as a kick-off for a human rights film project facilitated by the University Libraries’ Multicultural Affairs Committee (MAC) and Human Values for Transformative Action (HVTA), a Bowling Green-based human rights organization.

A series of 12 documentaries with human rights themes will be shown at the Jerome Library as well as area libraries. The movies were distributed by the Human Rights Video Project (HRVP), a national group, in conjunction with the American Library Association, to U.S. libraries that applied for a HRVP grant.

Jerome Library is one of 50 libraries in the United States that received the grant, which includes 12 videos and $750.

The goal of the HRVP is to bring as much attention as possible to existing human rights issues by distributing films to libraries, in the hope that through education people will gain an understanding of the importance and severity of human rights issues.

“The Human Rights Video Project fits well with the University Libraries’ goal of providing opportunities to inform, educate and sensitize the BGSU community and beyond,” said Dr. Lorraine J. Haricombe, dean of University Libraries.

“I’m happy we did receive the grant,” said Mary Wrighten, the film project’s coordinator. “I’m happy that we’re able to add informational material to our [library] collection that will inform our community about human rights issues, and I hope that it helps in the endeavor to bring about change.”

The movies will be added to Jerome Library’s collection and will be available to other libraries in the state of Ohio. Wrighten anticipates that the videos will be used in University classes. “It is my hope that as we inform the campus community of titles, they will check them out academically,” she said.

Among the 12 movies that will be shown, the issues of police brutality, child labor and other various human rights issues will be portrayed.

In addition to showing the films in the Jerome Library, Bowling Green will lend several documentaries to the Toledo Lucas County Public Library and the Wood County District Public Library for public viewing.

After each film is shown at Jerome Library, MAC and HVTA plan to hold group discussions for audience members, providing questions to guide conversation.

Yesterday’s movie, “Promises,” followed seven Israeli and Palestinian children through their daily lives, showing their drastically varying viewpoints and the aspects of their lives that shape the way they view the region’s centuries-old religious and political conflict. The film built up to a meeting of the seven children, who for one day had the chance to try to understand each other’s backgrounds and opinions. The children, many of whom were initially repulsed by the idea of associating with children from the “other side,” ended up becoming friends — for a day.

Two years after their meeting, the children had lost all contact with each other.

This outcome was bothersome to those who watched the film, but it was not unexpected.

“I don’t know how people can become friends and find common ground in such a short time,” said Kausalya Padmaraj, a member of MAC. “They have had a history of conflict in that region. They have to work on it slowly, slowly, slowly, but they can’t lose hope.”

Other audience members found similarities between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and societal conflicts in the U.S.

“Even though it is a movie about people in a different world, I could see a lot of parallels with life in the United States,” said Nancy Down, Interim Head of the Brown Popular Culture Library. “We all live in marginalized groups that don’t listen to each other.”

This is just the point HVTA Executive Director Dr. Lorna hopes people take away from viewing the documentaries. She believes the group discussions will serve “as a launching pad for involving communities in promoting human rights and human well-being within local communities.”

The Jerome Library will show the 11 remaining human rights documentaries intermittently through the end of Spring semester, until June 30, 2005.