| editorial welcome | Race Rocks | anthropology trip | holocaust project |
| tidal energy | theatre | PEI conferences | gender day |
| International Affairs | model UN | ice skating | games |
by Vijay Kumar (year 30)
FIRST CONFERENCE: FORAY ON DOCUMENTARY FILM-MAKING
On Monday, February 14, we students from the Pearson Ethics Initiative participated in a symposium in Toronto held by Foray, a forum for young voices on our global future. Its citizen shift project at the National Film Board was launching an experimental initiative encouraging youth to engage in documentary film-making on the theme of social justice.
Along with us were 150 other aspiring student film makers across Canada. Moreover, among the guests in the symposium were directors Avi Lewis whose documentary The Take was about the worker crisis in Argentina and Hugo Latulippe who showed his documentary What Remains of Us, an exploration of Tibet through the eyes of a Canada-Tibetan woman who traveled to Tibet. With the speeches of these video-activists and academics we explored the connections between media and democracy, art and activism, with a particular focus on documentary film as a tool for social change.
The launched event had offered us both inspiration and practical advice for participants who were invited to submit their own pitches, following the event, for 10 minute documentary shorts on a social justice or environmental theme. The proposal we submitted was
that students at both Pearson College and UWC South East Asia document the process of equipping these two groups of students with challenges with the skills and opportunity needed to tell their story on film, and the results of exchanging those stories with each other. Our goal was to create circumstances in which these students can tell their story, we learn who they are, what they think, and how they feel; their humanity emerges as their most essential characteristic. By exchanging their stories with each other, these two groups of students learn their situation is not unique
The winning student productions chosen by the National Film Board of Canada and citizen shift team will be screened by the national film board for spring 2005 and submitted to TWO and CBC for television broadcast. Let's hope when the results are announced around spring that the Pearson proposal will pull through!
NEXT: PEI ATTENDS THE WORLD AFFAIRS CONFERENCE
