Ohio University Southern Special Projects Producer and Marketing Specialist Brad Bear met his Pavilion Pictures partner Jeff Ford during a global filmmaking competition. Little did Bear know his next project with Ford would take him around the world.

Ford wrote, directed and narrated a Bear-produced documentary titled “Where’s The Fair?” Seeking answers to that simple question was set in motion when Ford looked through a children’s Viewfinder in Knoxville, Tenn., and saw pictures from the World’s Fair held there in 1982.

“We discovered while making ‘Where’s The Fair?’ that we were actually asking the wrong question,” Bear said. “We realized we should be asking why Americans don’t hear about the World’s Fair anymore.”

Bear said the latter spawned a series of other questions and sparked a seemingly endless debate about Americans’ role as citizens of the world and how aware we are about what’s happening around us.

“In an age when we feel like we have all the information about any topic at our fingertips, we were unable to find an easy answer,” Bear said. “That’s when we knew we had to get to the bottom of it and a documentary was the perfect medium to tell this story.”

The film has garnered six awards in 2013 and recently had two screenings on the campus of OUS during International Education Week. Bear admits although the film was aimed at educating viewers about the World’s Fair, he himself learned a lot while making the documentary.

“I learned just how much I don’t know about the world or my place in it,” he said. “One doesn’t embark on a journey of this scale and finish without being profoundly changed by it.”

There is much to be learned from others living the same human lives as we do in a different way, Bear said, and he has a much more broad understanding of and respect for foreign cultures. He also said he has a much deeper appreciation of what it means to be an American.

“I learned about the excellent organization of living space in Spain, the efficiency of a workday in Germany, the hospitality of the Japanese and what it means to be part of an inclusive society like Canada,” he said. “Traveling abroad makes the rest of the world more of a real place. I was able to see what the world has to offer, and it’s magnificent.”

Bear says he had some reservations about traveling to China and those feelings were in no way appeased by his itinerary.

“When we arrived in China to film some very important segments of the film, we had been on a plane more than 15 hours; that alone can be emotionally taxing,” he said. “I had anxiety about traveling to China in the first place, and add all these things together with a 12-hour time change and needless to say, I was a bit grumpy.”

The World’s Fair, also known as the World’s Exposition, is controlled by the Paris, France-based International Board of Expositions (BIE). A 2001 letter from then-Secretary of State Colin Powell to the BIE officially withdrew the United States from the board.

Ford said in his narration of the film withdrawing from the BIE is the equivalent of withdrawing from the International Olympic Committee. Powell’s letter cited lack of funding as the reason for the withdrawal, and while making the film Bear and Ford possibly found out why funding was no longer available.

“It’s more that the U.S. is uninterested in engaging the cultural diplomacy with foreign countries since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” he said. “Once our government felt it had won the Cold War, its interest in things like the World’s Fair declined.”

Bear isn’t overly optimistic about whether the United States will petition the BIE to rejoin and cites a lack of interest from Congress and the U.S. citizenship.

“There are a few groups in the United States working to get us involved again, and I hope they can get it accomplished,” he said. “There is no constituency in the U.S. and therefore no incentive for a member of Congress to support it.”

The documentary dissects how participating countries notice the absence of U.S. involvement in the fair. Widely considered to be one of three major events in which countries peacefully compete — the Olympics and World Cup being the others — it is the only of the three events that is more about brains than brawn.

“When the most powerful country in the world snubs an event like this it says a lot about us to the rest of the world,” Bear said. “When we fail to participate in World’s Fairs, it’s the same as it would be if we failed to show up at the Olympics.”

More information about Bear, Ford, Pavilion Pictures and the documentary is available online at www.wheresthefair.com or www.facebook.com/WheresTheFair.