Who? : What? : Why? : Website Highlights : Looking Ahead : Contact

WHO??
The Documentary Project for Refugee Youth is a collaboration between refugee youth, Raeshma Razvi, Global Action Project, the International Rescue Committee and other community organizations and artists in New York City.
The Project revolves around a core group of 12 refugee youth living in New York City, and the Friday night workshop the group attends. The youth are young adults ages 14-17, all currently enrolled in public schools, and living in 4 of New York’s 5 boroughs. The group is mainly West African and Balkan, with youth originally from Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Burundi and Serbia.
This group began working together in New York in September 2001, and continues to meet.

WHAT WE DO??
The Project engages in multimedia documentary work –interviews, photography, journal-writing and video—to create meaningful products about the refugee condition of displacement, desire for connection and need for home.
The Project has many aims, one of the main ones being to create a dynamic and engaged group of refugee youth who, at a crucial juncture of resettlement in their lives, begin to count on each other and on making media as means of coping and thriving during this change.
The Project thus seeks to create a satisfying and rich process that, in effect, translates into artistic products that engage the general population on issues of war, refugee-ness, forced migration, loss and regeneration.

WHY WE DO THIS??
Documentary work –be it photography, journalism, writing, research or video—has historically played a key role in civically engaging people. This Project hopes first to engage the participating youth first as individuals and as a group by introducing them to methods that help them to express themselves, to release some of the stories and images they have within them, and to forge a common bond with each other in the sharing and shaping of their common stories. The second level of engagement comes when the work the youth produce can then be shown to their peers, their families, and other people nationally and internationally.
The effect of this is to validate the personal expressions of a marginalized community, to educate people about war and the refugee condition, and to produce work that becomes part of the social-issue documentary ‘canon’: one which takes engagement of media-maker, subject and audience as a serious and necessary interaction in democratic culture.

WEBSITE HIGHLIGHTS
* 12 scrapbooks that are works-in-progress for a 2-year period, and a template for a ‘master’ scrapbook for which we are trying to find a publisher
* A 10-minute video called “One Family” that combines the testimonies of each youth with evocative and poetic imagery.
* A series of photo-essays which are currently works-in-progress
* A series of digitally tape-recorded interviews with other refugee youth in NYC
* The testimonies of our youth when they first told their stories to each other
* A multimedia curricula that will be forthcoming
* “One Family” has been accepted and screened at: the Hampton’s International Film Festival (youth, non-juried), The Peace and Human Security Media Festival, the IFG Independent Film Series at the Den, and IMNY-TV Ch. 25 in New York.
* The Project held a special screening/event to commemorate and raise awareness of World Refugee Day on June 20, 2002 in New York City. Three refugee youth-produced videos were shown at the Open Society Institute.
* Three youth were awarded paid scholarships in summer of 2002 from Amnesty International’s Patrick Stewart Human Rights Scholarship Fund. The youth interviewed other refugee youth around New York and tape-recorded their stories of war and displacement –forming a new archive of refugee youth stories. The youth were the youngest to receive the very competitive scholarships that year.

LOOKING AHEAD...
* The refugee program has been asked to present its work at the inaugural Refugee Film Festival in Charlottesville, Virginia in June 2003; the Taos Talking Pictures Festival in April 2003; and the Global Kids’ Conference on War and Children.
* The Project will collaborate with Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in June 2003 to highlight refugee films/filmmakers on World Refugee Day 2004.
* The youth who received scholarships will present their research at various Amnesty events.
* The group is producing 1-2 more short videos in 2002/2003, and other creative work.
* The Project is also exploring producing a feature-length documentary in which several youth will return to their countries-of-origin with each other, show their work, visit family and friends, and undertake an international effort –through media-- to engage an international audience on the effects of war on young people.

CONTACT
The Documentary Project for Refugee Youth
Global Action Project
4 West 37th Street
2nd Floor
New York, NY 10018

Tel: 212.594.9577 : Fax: 212.594.9574

General Information: refugee@global-action.org