Cameron Bailey writes about The Third Cinema Festival in 1987 taking place in Waterloo, London, North York, and Toronto. Bailey defines third cinema as "films that the system cannot assimilate and which are foreign to its needs..." in which "third world" filmmakers create documents and portraits of their lives from within their own culture, as opposed to the western tendency of imposing meaning and interpretations upon another culture. While lacking in the niceties of larger festivals, The Third Cinema Festival is almost solely dedicated to issues of colonialism, land and pressures of western modernity, which Bailey suggests may be born out of a need for proper representation. Films from Iran, Brazil, Kenya and the Phillipines are amongst the highlights, while others fall into the trappings of being merely oppositional. Ultimately, while Bailey applauds the efforts of the organizers, he suggests a need to have "third world" curators and programmers in order to assure that the program is not being mediated by the culture these films reject.