What we do What is Ola Fest?

AWAKENING/ art & culture presents: The 8th Annual Orlando Latin American Film & Heritage Festival February 16-18, 2012

AWAKENING /art & culture, a 501(C) 3, non-profit organization, develops, integrates and promotes initiatives in the arts, sustainability, filmmaking and civic culture. We promote a vision of society based on economic self-reliance, environmental preservation, cultural promotion and good governance.

When is one universal? Only when he is honest with his own community… It all has a starting point and that point is absolutely local." - Fernando Botero/Colombian Artist

The Orlando Latin American Film & Heritage Festival (OLA FEST) is dedicated to presenting independent and new Latin American cinema, socially relevant and challenging films not readily offered in Central Florida. Part celebration and part education, OLA FEST is a community-building initiative--not just a showcase of movies-- promoting an open space for passion, dialogue, conviviality, and usefulness.

In ancient Greece, theatre was understood to identify and explain a central question, namely, the question of  how human beings should live. To attend a tragic drama was not to go to a distraction or a fantasy, in the course of which one suspended one’s anxious practical questions. It was instead to engage in a communal process of inquiry, reflection, and feeling with respect to important civic and personal ends. It is not, I think, a far-fetched claim that popular films can also be seen as implicitly, if not explicitly, addressing the question of how human beings should live." --Margaret R. Miles

OLA VERDE (Green Wave) fosters sustainability as a community practice through films, open discussions and symposia brought to you by eminent scholars, academics, artists, and environmental leaders, to expand the qualities, relationships and possibilities for a different future.

What can educators do to foster real intelligence? ... We can attempt to teach the things that one might imagine the Earth would teach us: silence, humility, holiness, connectedness, courtesy, beauty, celebration, giving, restoration, obligation, and wildness." ---David W. Orr

The Cultural Bill of Rights

1. The right to our heritage--the right to explore music, literature, drama, painting, and dance that define both our nation's collective experience and our individual and community traditions.
2. The right to the prominent presence of artists in public life--through their art and the incorporation of their voices and artistic visions into democratic debate.
3. The right to an artistic life--the right to the knowledge and skills needed to play a musical instrument, draw, dance, compose, design, or otherwise live a life of active creativity.
4. The right to be represented to the rest of the world by art that fairly and honestly communicates America's democratic values and ideals.
5. The right to know about and explore art of the highest quality and to the lasting truths embedded in those forms of expression that have survived, in many lands, through the ages.
6. The right to healthy arts enterprises that can take risks and invest in innovation while serving communities and the public interest. --Bill Ivey

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