When United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was foreign minister of South Korea from 2004 through 2006, he experienced directly how entertainment can shape popular perceptions, when not one but two TV networks began airing miniseries about the lives of Korean diplomats.
Although the series romanticized diplomat life with requisite dashes of love and conflict, the net effect for the foreign ministry was a burnished public image. “Good storytelling is a very strong tool to change the attitudes and minds of people,” Ban recalled in an interview.
Ban said that’s what was on his mind this week as he led a veritable platoon of top U.N. officials, including the heads of UNICEF and the World Health Organization, on a mission to Hollywood to build relationships with the entertainment community and encourage film and television story lines about issues high on the U.N. agenda, such as climate change and violence against women.
“I’m here to talk to the creative community — Hollywood — about how they could help the United Nations’ work,” he said.”I’ve been meeting presidents and prime ministers, and leaders of the business communities, but my audience has always been very limited. If a journalist picks up what I have said, that’s all I can do, but I really want to have the U.N. message coursing continually, and spreading out continuously to the whole world. The creative community, through [TV] and movies, can reach millions and millions of people at once, repeatedly, and then 10 and 20 years after a film’s been made, the messages can be constant.”
Ban was the keynote speaker at a day-long series of panels Tuesday at the Hammer Museum that culminated with a private dinner headlined by President Clinton and attended by industry figures including Universal Studios President Ron Meyer, directors Jason Reitman and Ed Zwick, and actors Kiefer Sutherland and Samuel L. Jackson. In between public events, Ban held private meetings with Anne Hathaway, Maria Bello, Sean Penn and Demi Moore, who came to discuss their particular political passions. Those at the forum were repeatedly reminded of the U.N.’s programs in peacekeeping, health, feeding the hungry and environmental protection.
On one of the panels, filmmaker Terry George (“Hotel Rwanda”) pointed out that there are essentially two U.N.s — one comprising the hundreds of thousands of workers on the ground in war-torn and impoverished countries, and the “monolith in New York.” George is working on a biopic about Sergio Vieira de Mello, the chief of the U.N. mission to Iraq who was killed by a terrorist bomb in 2003.
