Pangea is a name with a mythic allure. Pan Gaea is Ancient Greek for the Earth when it was just one solid land mass, before it broke up and drifted apart. Pangea Day – this Saturday – seeks to reunite us all once again in a mind-blowing filmfest with an estimated possible audience of 500 million or more. And best of all, you don’t even have to leave home to participate, as you can watch it on TV, website or even your mobile phone.

There are 24 prize-winning shorts selected from at least 2,500 entries worldwide. Ranging from a few minutes to 20 minutes long, they cover a wide range of categories from comedy to tragedy, with subtitles in Arabic, English, French, German, Hindi, Portuguese and Spanish – although in most cases the pictures tell the stories, which were chosen for their ability to show the world through each film-maker’s eyes.

The films range from horrific and troubling to moving and light-hearted. A few are animations. One short is about the Laughter Clubs of India – a form of yoga that has become something of a cultural phenomenon, even spreading to New York and Los Angeles. In the promo, a group of smiling Kenyans improbably sings the national anthem of India.

The Pangea Day programme will be broadcast live from six locations: Cairo, Kigali in Rwanda, Los Angeles, Bombay, Rio de Janeiro and Somerset House in London. There will also be live music from the likes of Bob Geldof and Dave Stewart.

Forest Whitaker, Robin Williams and Cameron Diaz are some of the stars on board to support it. The host will be Christiane Amanpour, the chief international correspondent of CNN.

More than 1,000 simultaneous Pangea Day events, taking place everywhere from Times Square to living rooms to community centres and schools, will also be transmitting photos, videos and text messages for incorporation into the live broadcast. This is a Happening on a grand scale.

And who kicked off this truly ambitious event? It was a bright young film-maker called Jehane Noujaim, to whom I spoke this week. Her first film was a very short short of a snake eating a mouse, but it wasn’t until her documentary about garbage collectors in Cairo won a prestigious TED (Technical Entertainment and Design) prize that she came to prominence.

She was invited to “make a wish” at TED’s annual conference, and wished “that the voice of the world could be heard”. She envisioned connecting the planet through film, “a way to build bridges, to learn each other’s dance moves”.

The daughter of an American mother and an Egyptian-Lebanese-Syrian father, she jokes that she herself could be called a “personal peace crisis”. Her background veered skittishly between tight-knit community values and internationalism.

A Harvard graduate in philosophy and visual arts, she learnt film craft from D. A. Pennebaker, the brilliant documentary-maker of classics such as Monterey Pop and Don’t Look Back. She found herself drawn to the intimate particulars of a world in crisis – real people in duress, in joy, in anger, in sorrow, in celebration. If only the universality of emotion could create a common language between disparate and oppositional people, she thought.

Her first documentary, Control Room (2004), was an investigation of news coverage of Iraq, including interviews with the military press, CNN, NBC and Iraq Central Command. Ten minutes of interviews took place in the Qatar headquarters of al-Jazeera, a television station that serves more than 40 million viewers in the Arab world and has weathered accusations of being al-Qaeda’s mouthpiece.Another film, Encounter Point (2006), included Hezbollah (the Lebanese paramilitary group) and Israeli militants finally talking across the political barriers.

“Film has the ability to create that kind of intimacy across hostile boundaries,” she says. “For viewers, seeing the issues on film opens up a dialogue.”

The practical inspiration for Pangea Day came from her first working stint ten years ago, at MTV, when the show distributed 40 camcorders to teenagers and asked them to tell their own stories. Now Nokia and the UN have made it possible for her to expand the experiment worldwide, sending mobile phone cameras even into refugee camps.

Some might be tempted to sneer at the ambition of it all. Whenever someone says, “If all the people all around the world would just join hands” the temptation is ripe for some smart aleck to add: “Three fifths of them would drown.” But hey, give peace a chance.

Pangea Day events can be seen on Sky Independent Movies and on www.pangeaday.org

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