While their films targeted mass audiences, they were known for exceptional, restrained acting, lilting music and classic photography, and presented social ills like untouchability and landlessness, as well as personal angst and loneliness, with rare integrity and maturity.
Landlessness is a huge problem all over the world.
But microplots are a feasible cure for landlessness when more ambitious programs have failed.
"The presence of palm oil plantations has spawned a new poverty and is triggering a crisis of landlessness and hunger.
The Philippines is full of forgotten citizens, marginalised by isolation and poverty, landlessness and illiteracy, by loggers and prospectors, armed thugs and corrupt local officialdom.
But, activists say, the program is too narrow to help a large number of people and doesn't solve the fundamental problem of landlessness.
She said the work of the Rural Development Institute, the first Kravis Prize recipient, has become a case study at the Stanford Business School for how it addressed rural landlessness in India.
"In Nigeria, the drying up of Lake Chad and coastal erosion at the other end of the country has pushed the population into a smaller space, creating poverty, landlessness and increasing conflict".
But the unprecedented worldwide rush for land to grow food or fuel crops for the international market is now hitting some of the poorest communities hard, and leaving them at risk of violence and landlessness.
Yes, the greatest dilemmas facing humanity are still landlessness, homelessness, and hunger... but today our televisions and newspapers tell us about these fundamental problems more quickly and more simply than literature ever could.
