Mankind Is No Island Analysis

Being the world’s largest short film festival, the Tropfest New York encourages people of all ages to share their personal stories as a short film. We believe every single of those stories deserves an audience. However this year’s winner of the Tropfest Award manages to take the role of an audience from us and makes us really empathize with someone we always pretended to understand.
The short film “Mankind Is No Island“ adresses a common taboo topic of our modern society – those who are not a part of that society. It puts across the topic homelessness and the fact that one has failed at managing his life resulting in ending up on the street.
The pictures the director and writer Jason van Genderen creates are not simulating to be made professionally.
One of the quintessences of “Mankind Is No Island“ is the problem that we blend out all the poverty and despair on the streets while praising all the beauty and loveliness of the cities we live in. Every sensitive viewer has to be aware of the frightening directness Van Genderen’s film succeeds in showing us the edge of our society quite painly with, underlined by desperate piano and violin music. When we look at the title of the film we understand that even the minority group, a group whose basic biological needs of Maslow’s hierachy are fulfilled only, is belonging to the mankind, having all values and emotions with us in common. There is no Island within our species that is no longer a part of the mankind.
But it is not only the fact that “The Mankind Is No Island“ touches our hearts that affected our decision to elect Jason Van Genderen being the winner of our contest, it is fact that he spoke out on something we wouldn’t have had the heart to