DOCUMENTARIES

THE MILLENNIUM DINNERS

Three feature documentaries, If Women Ruled the World, 9/11/03: A Day in the Life of New York, and Legacy: Black and White in America, were created by Karz Productions for The Millennium Dinners series. With the inauguration of a new millennium occurring at a critical juncture in human advancement, the series was conceived as an opportunity to take stock of how much the human condition has and hasn’t changed in order to clarify the feasibility of achieving a sustainable future.

Each of the three documentaries focuses on an issue of transformational change: women’s empowerment, globalization, and racial integration. The dinner party provides the platform for bringing leaders together from different professions to present a comparative perspective, and the dialectic of conversation provides the narrative arc. Day-in-the-life profiles of the featured dinner guests and vignettes dramatize the issues.

The series uses the dinner party—where primal physical needs are satisfied in a social setting—as a metaphor to examine the tension in modern life between the civilized and the uncivilized and the changing nature of community.