"Living on One Dollar" - A Documentary on Poverty and Hope
"Living on One Dollar" is a film edited, produced, and directed by Ryan Christopher, Sean Leonard, Zach Ingrasci, and Chris Temple. The movie is anchored on the life experience of four youngsters – students who decided to examine on the life of spending a dollar a day for about two months in the rural Guatemala in North America.
The Reality of Poverty and the Journey to Escape
In the process of lifelike experience, the four friends are made to fight parasites and hunger for them to survive and they find out that life was not easy at all. However, through their neighbor Rosa, a woman aged twenty and her husband Anthony, and their twelve-year-old son Chino, they get the hope that there are effective ways of dealing with poverty and are encouraged by their generosity and strength.
Poverty and the Struggles Faced
The movie presents the reality in the world that poverty levels are still high and many are the children that are unable to achieve their goals in life as a result of lack of enough resources to support their schooling. The process of getting out of poverty is laborious, and many are the times that the culprits never make it out of the arduous journey. The quest of the film producers is to understand the reality of poverty and their adventure provides excellent insight on the families that are forced to live a life of abject poverty.
The Cycle of Poverty
People who live on less than a dollar a day are poor and that translated into failure to provide for their basic needs including shelter, clothing, food, and education (Bardhan, Pranab 12). Many are the times when such people go without food for some days, and when they access it, it is not enough to cater for their hunger pangs. Also, poor people live in a world of unforeseen problems, and in some cases, they are homeless, jobless, and uneducated.
Breaking the Poverty Cycle
The filmmaker of the documentary introduces the audience to individuals who live in poverty and the statistics on the number of people living in poverty. They present the hard fact that it is difficult to live in poverty and it is also hard to get out of the hard life. Therefore, poverty is a vicious cycle that needy families go through for generations. Poor parents are unable to educate their children who in return end up illiterate as their parents and in the end, they mature up and bear children who continue the cycle.
The Call for Action
If nothing is done to break the poverty chain, many families succumb to poverty. The movie shows the struggles of young parents go through in the process of raising their children and acts as a wakeup call to people living in poverty to encourage them to come up with innovative solutions and explore alternative ways to fight poverty at all levels. The trillions of dollars that the United States has dedicated to fighting poverty in some quotas of the country goes to waste if nothing is done to empower the affected individuals to change their lifestyle (Bardhan, Pranab 15).
Inspiring Change through Compassion
Anthony and his wife, Rosa are perfect examples of what needs to be done to come up with solutions to the issues affecting the society. The film acts as a lesson to the many Americans who live better lives and challenges them to embrace charity to help those in need. There are people in the world that balance between feeding and taking children to school and they not only fight to better their lives but also fight to survive. Therefore, the documentary is crucial in revealing the many individuals in the world living in poverty that most people do not know about and provokes actions to end their misery.
Work Cited
Bardhan, Pranab. "Globalization And Rural Poverty." World Development, vol 34, no. 8, 2015, pp. 10-19. Elsevier BV, doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2005.10.010.
