Arts Beat: Peace Offerings

The Global Peace Film Festival is screening 57 new movies at three locations through Oct. 4.

For some reason this peace, love and understanding bit keeps popping up, and apparently the pope isn’t the only one out there trying to get people to buy into it. There’s also the Global Peace Film Festival, which kicks off Tuesday, Sept. 29.

Through Oct. 4, the Orlando-based festival is screening 57 new films, most of them documentaries and all of them about individuals struggling for peace. A couple trying to overcome their grief over losing their son in the World Trade Center attack. A soul-searching quest by a conservative minister who’s beginning to realize that he can’t be both pro-life and pro-gun. A clash between modernity and sacred traditions in Tibet, where a Western-style beauty pageant triggers trouble. And my personal must-see: Planetary, a documentary that explores another one of those subjects that keeps popping up: our cosmic origins and our future as a species.

Roughly two dozen of the filmmakers will make appearances, as will various other experts who’ll take part in panel discussions about subjects brought up in the films, each of which will be screened twice: once in Winter Park and once in Orlando. In Winter Park, the screenings are either at Rollins College or at the Winter Park Public Library, which is just across the street from the campus. In Orlando, the films will be shown at Premiere Cinema 14 at Orlando Fashion Square.

You can get tickets online for the Winter Park screenings, but for Fashion Square you’ll need to go to the box office to purchase them. You’ll find a schedule of the screenings and a link to buy tickets on the festival website: peacefilmfest.org.

Peace out.