Reviewed by Elliot V. Kotek
(July 2008)
Director: Kenneth Kokin
Starring: Blake Mycoskie, Pam Mycoskie, Aleio Nitti, Patricia, and the TOMS Shoes family
At one time, growing up in an urban Australian metropolis, it was difficult for me to imagine anyone being so removed from a welfare-healthy community that they could not find a pair of shoes to protect their feet from the earth's surface. The thought, "Was it perhaps a preference? Some connection to the land?" probably crossed my mind once or twice. Besides, wasn't shoelessness limited to those rural parts of the world where feet become so calloused that the foot's owners are able to survive even an African outback (a la Zola Budd and her barefoot Olympic effort? anyone? 1984?)?
To some extent, the "choice" to go barefoot was, at one time, seen by a very young me as a somewhat romantic notion to be coupled with a word like "freedom."
However, ever since Majid Majidi's Academy Award-nominated masterpiece, Children of Heaven, I've understood the value that even one pair of shoes can shoulder in a poor community. A sub-par pair of shoes has the ability to permanently pinhole a person within their birthplace, tied to their own, tied to those they owe. Conversely, a simple soled sneaker can be treasured - a sacred, visible measure of an individual's ability to represent themselves in public, a material support system that can allow a child to belong in a school of education or can allow an adult to belong in the world of the worker, the provider. A world of inclusion.
The fact of the matter expressed in this short documentary, which premiered at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, is that 40 percent of the world's people don't have shoes. Also conveyed in this inspirational short doc is that the status quo can be shaken loose by a case of the smarts. TOMS ("Shoes for Tomorrow") founder Blake Mycoskie took a sweet and charitable initial gesture - manufacturing 200+ pairs of Argentinian-made shoes, for each sale of which a matching pair would be gifted to an Argentinian child without shoes of their own - and, with a mere mention from the LA Times regarding the endeavor, received some 2200 shoe orders. The consequent enterprise has now resulted in shoe drops of some 65,000 pairs of shoes to needy kids in Argentina, South Africa and elsewhere. In the process, Mycoskie gave birth to one of the fastest-growing footwear companies on the planet, led by responsible entrepeneurs and interns-cum-employees who've decided that the curly-haired crusader's journey is one worth joining.
For Tomorrow chronicles the bustling vehicle that carried friends of TOMS around Argentina on their initial shoe drop in 2006. The sight of a couple of polo-playing lads (Mycoskie and business partner Aleio Nitti) embracing a local population of a people without means for material, and providing them with a physical platform on which to stand independently, is undeniably moving. Corporate social responsibility, or "CSR," is a major buzz word in the modern commerce community, and although the documentary may receive some criticism leveling the film as an advertisement for their product, it is a product worth promoting, a product whose very genesis engenders humanitarian action. A product that feels good - and also, as evidenced by this doc, helps do real good. -MPM View footage from the film.
Find more information about TOMS Shoes.
Photos courtesy of the filmmaker. |
