Three eye-opening JRF/BBC documentaries are now available to watch online.
Filmmaker Andy Glynne discusses the Why Poverty? series and explains:
As a filmmaker, I'd travelled a lot, and filmed the images that we still associate with the word 'poverty': malnourished children in sub-Saharan Africa; those with no roofs over their heads or without access to water. Poverty was, I had thought, an absence of the fundamentals to live by, and we filmmakers trooped around the world highlighting the inequalities between the rich North and the poor South, bringing awareness to a problem far away, somewhere on the other side of the world – somewhere that, well, wasn't here.
Because – as the notion goes – inequalities on this scale don't exist here in the UK, do they? Well, yes and no. It was when embarking on this project that the notion of relative poverty – in which poverty can exist for those who are considerably worse off than the majority of the population – became of interest.
As we researched stories about poverty in the UK, we became aware of the ways in which being relatively poor can have a plethora of horrible consequences. And although such consequences may seem to lack the immediacy of being acutely life-threatening, they can nevertheless insidiously create physical, psychological and social inequalities on a hugely significant scale.
The three films are available to watch online on the Joseph Rowntree Foundation website: http://www.jrf.org.uk/blog/2013/01/poverty-captured-bbc-storyville-films
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