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Beauty Will Save the World
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Beauty Will Save the World
IDFA 2004

Beauty Will Save the World

Pietra Brettkelly
England, New Zealand
2004
62 min
Festival history

Tragic and hilarious account of the first Miss Net World beauty contest. In 2002, a Libyan has the brilliant idea to hold the first beauty contest for the most gorgeous Internet model in Libya. The preliminary national rounds, held on the Net, produce a busload of models who proudly set out for Libya, and vaguely remember that once upon a time something was wrong with this country. But what? Only four years ago, Colonel Khadafi was a tyrant from the Axis of Evil, but meanwhile he has been rehabilitated after making a few noncommittal promises. Khadafi niftily plays his trumps: he makes the models, and the journalists, wait for days before going to meet them. And since they have to wait, they might as well take a tour of his bombed house. Result: sobbing models cursing the war and the evil in mankind. BEAUTY WILL SAVE THE WORLD is a fly-on-the-wall documentary of the beauty contest for which, it seems, the filmmakers just had to film events from a distance. The absurd spectacle unfolds right before their eyes. They follow the nineteen-year-old American candidate Teca Zendik, who later became the first US honorary consul in Libya in twenty years.

Credits
Director
Co-production
    Bullseye Productions - England
    Bullseye Productions - England
Cinematography
Involved TV Channel
    Rialto Channel - New Zealand
    Rialto Channel - New Zealand
World Sales
Screening copy
    The TV Set
    The TV Set