Movie Guide: Living on One Dollar

This 56 minute documentary on Netflix is the best thing I have seen this year for either a Spanish or a Social Studies class. 4 college students spend 56 days in a remote Guatemalan village on a dollar a day budget while they explore the effects of living in extreme poverty and some clever innovative solutions people have come up with to survive. This film is excellent for any Spanish class where you have been studying immigration and the reasons people leave their home countries to risk their lives traveling to the US, or for a social studies class where you are looking at underdeveloped countries and what it means to live in extreme poverty. My students loved this film bc it was created by four college students and uses their observations and connections as the narrative between the interviews with people in the village. (Interviews are all in Spanish with subtitles, narrative in English. ) Suitable for any level middle or high school class and available to view on Netflix, this film was such a gem you will want to own a copy. Movie guide contains 29 questions in chronological order with opportunities to stop the film and think/pair/share and for students to react with their own opinions.

Note: If your students enjoyed this film and you teach Social Studies, be sure to check out their newest release: Salam Neighbor, where they spend a month in a Syrian refugee camp.

This download has been revised to include a Spanish version of the questions and an additional after viewing activity for students to investigate Micro loans and raise funds to sponsor someone like the people in the film. 4/9/2022

Movie Guide: Living on One Dollar by Barbara Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.