What would life be like if you had to survive on one dollar per day as your only income? Four middle class, suburban, male, college students travel to a small rural village in Guatemala, called Pena Blanca, to try and answer this question. And also what would it be like to explore that world having come from a life that is so different, so privileged by comparison?
In a similar approach to Freakanomics and Gang Leader for A Day, these young men find that a real life approach to a real life problem – social economics far below the poverty line, bears much more fruit than the books they’re studying.
They live on one dollar a day as their only income. Further, one intriguing point about their experiment is that locals don’t always know how much if anything they are going to earn on any one day. So the boys decide to pull a random number from a hat $0-9, which decides their income for that period.
They bring with them two filmmakers: Ryan Christoffersen and Sean Leonard. And the four of them for their time spent, consistently sway between trying desperately to survive, while learning tools from the locals – as well as offering their own tools to those in need. And on the other side of the scale, trying to be genuine with their experiment. If they don’t discover some answers to their questions, it may be because they are not approaching the topic accurately/honestly. And at a vital point they find that they could do more, they re-establish their process. We start to discover what this all means.
Besides the experiment, some of the most useful activities inside the film project are the interviews with the people they meet. They learn what it really does mean to survive in abject poverty. They also learn the difference between an experiment and the lives of the real people who have no choice but to live with it, and who can’t go home afterwards.
Through this journey we meet the young Chino whose family can’t afford to send him to school, but he is bright and optimistic, full of energy and wishes to learn Spanish and English. His dream is to play pro soccer, but he has decided that he will be a farmer. At just twelve years old he has resigned himself to the stark reality of life in his world. And yet you’ll rarely see him not smiling.
Anthony and Rosa, with a full family of their own at 20 years old and barely more than that for Anthony, they count themselves lucky because Anthony is one of the few people who live in this community who has an official job. He is a cleaner.
We meet a local woman who wishes to become a nurse, but can’t afford to go to school. Her family couldn’t afford to send her to school when she was a child, so she works on the farm.
The key to the success of the people here are the institutions that have been built to provide micro-loans – just about the only way for these people to work out solutions to move forward with their lives, instead of every day digging a deeper hole in the mud. The ordinary bank loan system here is simply not an option.
The experiment these four boys document is intriguing, interesting and emotional. However, it feels like only one small part of the story.
2.5 stars
the joy of eating and the folly of thinking 