Last Thursday, my group and I had the opportunity to share with our grade a film called Bhopali. I reached out to the director of the movie, Max Carlson, and he and I worked together to create questions to ask before and after the screening of the film. We presented selected clips of the movie and asked an array of questions to our classmates. In my opinion, our presentation was very powerful and it changed people’s view on corporations (specifically Dow), pollution, and environmental injustice. One example of an impact our screening had was that a classmate’s father was persuaded to get rid of all of the Dow stock that he owned.

We were also inspired to incorporate Bhopali into our teach-in workshop because of the powerful effect that it has on viewers. It shocks me that only one person in our entire grade had heard of the Bhopal gas disaster before Thursday. It was a tragedy that resulted in the deaths of more than 20,000 people. Children in Bhopal are still dying today from poisoned air and contaminated water. How is it possible that we don’t know about this? Our goal is to raise awareness, send hope and support to the people of Bhopal, and put pressure on the Dow Corporation to take responsibility for the tens of thousands of deaths that they caused because of corporate greed.

We recorded our classmates as they answered our questions before and after the film, and as suggested by Max Carslon, we will send him the footage which he hopes to edit into a video to post online. To continue to raise awareness and help the survivors of the disaster I plan to do many things including the following: I am interested in contacting other schools in nyc that we could possibly give a similar presentation to. This way we are spreading the impact and raising awareness to a wider community. In addition, I plan to ask Max Carlson of a sure way to donate money to the suffering children in Bhopal.