International Zone

The UN is a vast centre of information about politics and technology, human rights and peace-keeping, hunger and plenty. The words "United Nations, NY” appear almost daily in thousands of newspapers around the world. This progmmme takes the viewer into a vital, but rarely--seen part of the UN -- the realm of the "newsmakers". It is a backstage tour with the men and women who get the news, write it, film it speak it, and televise it.

The film consists of children's art from all over the world, art which broadens and deepens what is heard on the soundtrack.

The highlight of this memorable musical program is a rehearsal and performance by these two famous musicians of a new "raga" specially composed by Shankar.

An unique international venture has recently culminated in the rescue of the temples of Abu Simbel from the rising waters of the Nile, behind the new Aswan High Dam. Rameses II built Abu Simbel 3,000 years ago.

In Ghana, UN cameras found a challenging and colourful story - about water. In poor countries, the search for water - having enough of it - having it clean, having it nearby - is one of the vital processes in development.

A bone-dry land the size of France, with a population of no more than 600,000: that is Botswana -land locked in southern Africa, newly independent, beginning the painful early steps toward modern nationhood. Much of Botswana. is the Kalahari Desert, where David Livingstone once established a mission station and brought the first western schools to an isolated and bucolic people. Today Botswana’s new leaders look to their vast mineral resources from which to fashion a key to the industrial future its people want.

What it is like to be a soldier in the service of the United Nations. Private Patrick Fitzgerald is a member of an Irish battalion that served with the United Nations Force in Cyprus.

The film follows a Turkish doctor on assignment for the United Nations from his suburban home in Minneapolis, U.S.A., to the village in Turkey where he was born. We see him teaching and setting up research in a Turkish medical school and, accompanied by his teenage American daughter, visiting the scenes of his childhood. The doctor donated his time and expertise to his native country as part of a United Nations programme called TOKTEN, which co-ordinates the return home of eminent expatriate scientists and engineers for short-term consultancies.

"The most beautiful place on earth"... that's Laurence Gould's description of Antarctica, a continent, he first saw in 1934 when he was second-in-command to Admiral Byrd in the flight across the South Pole.

In Senegal, "rural animators" - youthful villagers - are sent off to learn simple new things in a government course (sanitation, how to grow vegetable) and then returned to their own towns to teach their skills to the rest of the people. In Indonesia, French agronomists teach the "Green Revolution" to a whole region and set up a co-op to purchase machinery and guarantee a market for rice. And in Peru, the Government begins a land reform program in spite of the suspicions of those it's designed to help.