SARVODAYA SHRAMADANA

Towards a non-violent economy

A film by Louis Campana & Francois Verlet

Extreme liberalism promised wealth and well-being for all but it generates crisis, unemployment and growing inequalities. Economic facts become determining factors for the future of our planet and its inhabitants.

Are the capitalist model and its consequence, economic growth the only solutions ?

Is a respectful economy, both for man and nature, possible ?

For the last 50 years, in the spirit of Gandhi « village republic »,  the SARVODAYA SHRAMADANA network (the awakening of all through shared labour) gives to six million Sri Lankans, 1/3 of Sri Lanka’s population, the opportunity to take control over their destiny.

This film is a meeting with Sri Lanka’s largest social change movement and its founders. It tells how the creation of village communities allowed millions of members to emancipate themselves from social determinism by the claimed awakening of its participants and the care of the workers’ network.

We discovered 15,000 villages organising themselves and their self-governance. Creating village societies, shared work camps, free clinics, schools, self-managed banks, local businesses, they build progessively an alternative, non-violent economy, independent of the world market.

This film also analyses the terrible conflict between Sri Lanka’s government, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and Sarvodaya’s efforts to help resolve it.

Is this method transposable? Can political power, often seized by an elite, be retaken by the people? Can we imagine as A.T. Aryaratne, founder of Sarvodaya says, that the world may become a community of village republics and finally get cleared of the institutionalised violence of multinational companies ?

Duration : 52 mn