Full Description
All over the world, millions of viewers are devotees of their favorite soap opera or telenovela. Millions watched All My Children in college and dressed up for the weddings. Millions more sat with grandma to have coffee and crullers while watching Days of Our Lives. In the 1960s, Mexican telenovela director Miguel Sabido concluded that this kind of content would be a perfect way to bring about social change. Way before the Internet, he was convinced that the masses could solve major global issues. He claims that his first soap series, about an elderly man wanting to finish elementary school by any means necessary, encouraged half a million adults to complete a government education project. Other popular series followed, and in Poor Consuelo Conquers the World, Sabido and other experts speak about the factors that contributed to these radical interventions. Sabido refined his formula until it became a scientific methodology that spread globally and resulted in a new field called entertainment-education. So while Sabido was busy directing a media entertainment empire, he was also creating a dynamic new model for socially sustainable development. Like Sabido’s work, director Peter Friedman’s Poor Consuelo Conquers the World is a wildly entertaining documentary that also provides a new blueprint for real social change.
