Discovery
‘Saving Mes Aynak’ campaign: Filmmakers are launching a crowdfunding campaign to save Mes Aynak — a 5,000year-old Buddhist archaeological site in Afghanistan — aimed at raising international pressure on a Chinese state-owned mining company, the Afghanistan government, and Unesco.
Variety has learned exclusively that the campaign for “Saving Mes Aynak”, which launches Monday, has a goal of raising $50,000 on the Indiegogo platform. Director Brent E. Huffman and documentary collective Kartemquin Films plan to distribute the film via VHX on July 1 with 10% of the raised funds going directly to funding archaeologists in preserving the site.
“Saving Mes Aynak” world premiered in November at the IDFA festival and screened in the US at the American Documentary Film Festival in Palm Springs and at the Full Frame Documentary Festival.
Mes Aynak contains Afghanistan’s largest copper deposit and over 400 Buddha statues, stupas and a 100-acre monastery complex. Archaeologists are beginning to find remnants of an older 5,000-year-old Bronze Age site beneath the Buddhist level.
The filmmakers are also hoping add signatures to a Change.org petition asking Afghanistan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani to spare the site from destruction via designation as a Unesco world heritage site. (RTRS) India holds census of asiatic lions: India on Saturday began a five-yearly count