My Camera My World

Bengali/English/Hindi with Eng subtitles/53 minutes/2011

To watch the Film visit the link below:

http://vimeo.com/27287829

An ECO production

For Public Service Broadcast Trust /2011

Synopsis

Three sets of children live their life at different levels of negotiations, in three different parts of India. The children: social orphans from Kolkata, upper middle class children from Delhi and adivasi (indigenous) children from Madhya Pradesh.

These children are not only separated by geography but also their socio-political milieu. Chances are that they may never encounter each other in their contemporary worlds.

A project gets underway to select a few children from these three diverse groups and share with them few basic filmmaking skills- enough to enable them to put together their thoughts and ideas into a short film within a window of couple of weeks. A Participatory Video process.

Facilitated by a community media practitioner and a documentary filmmaker, the children go through a process of introspection and interrogation of their lives. They relive their histories and dream their future. They meander in and out of their fears, their ecstasies. What they author and own, is a piece of film, they are proud of. They travel to a common destination, where all the children filmmakers meet and build bridges into each other’s lives, mediated through their films.

A documentary film, My Camera My World is woven around this process. The film tries to capture the journey of the children’s camera from the life around them to the world inside them….of their memories and thoughts.

Concept Script Direction

Krishnendu Bose

Children Participatory Videos

Design Facilitation Editing

Kavita Das Gupta

 

Making of PVR Nest CINEART Films 2010

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_2-pliGfu4

Films made by Children for PVR NEST CINEART 2010

Below are the youtube links to the 10 films made by children as part of the PVR NEST CINEART Project 2010.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vctLaUqdz-M
(Yeh toh hona hi tha)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHlbn8rnWC8
(Dil se Dekho)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cruge963e1w
(Pratha vahi soch nai)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRXTY-JOEsk
(Tree friends, True friends)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miz_FjYf1R8
(Jal ki Jalan)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOo74lNrC18
(Kabhi socha hai)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fsM-lMxySI
(A stitch in time)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPGFZUdtiIc
(Haryali Impossible)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj750z_954k
(Badon ka Bachpana)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zqLAghdGI0
(Red Alert)

Note on the films children made for CINEART 2010

  

I learnt that a film is made with the heart and the brain. Always heard unity in diversity but today saw it. I found a specialty in me. Avneet Kaur Gandhi, Summer Fields School.

Children and the ECO philosophy

Children by natural order could be very imaginative and creative. As we grow up, through our socialization processes, we are trained to be more focused on what we do best. We are encouraged to ‘perform’.  The contemporary education systems in India, also encourage rigid confines of success, where creativity and imagination could be stifled in predetermined boxes.

At ECO (Earthcare Outreach Trust), we strongly believe that imagination and creativity of children could be resurrected, scaffolded and awarded. Film making, could be that vehicle of transition. Film making is the platform where all the creative arts meet and it could provide the children an equal opportunity to reconnect with their creativity and imagination in expressing themselves. If the process is a truly participatory one and ensures children, author and own, their cinematic expression, the resultant creative empowerment could be immense.

The project

The ECO-CINEART project has worked on these lines. Two Hundred children, from privileged and disadvantaged sections of the NCR of Delhi were chosen to participate in this programme to make 10 short 2minute films. This project coordinated by ECO, ran for over half a year (2010), involving not only these 200 children but also 20 schools, scores of teachers, school managements and 4 workshop facilitators including backend workshop thinkers and coordinators. The films were made around the themes, which were predetermined by the project team of ECO. Themes were generic environment themes like water, trees, pollution, recycling, carbon footprint, governance, Delhi’s changing face and global warming -to be further developed by the children. But what was amazing was how the children turned around the themes, lensing it with their own personal perspective and experience and came out with 10 so very different environment films.

Reinterpreting ‘Environment’

We at ECO want to believe that environment discourse has to be rescued from the normative, to make it useful and effective. To cry hoarse about why, not to pollute or how to save water or why deforestation will destroy our planet, is a passé. If we have to make innovative communication to touch the heart and minds of the audience, the children should attempt personally engaging stories of the world around them. The narrow confines, built around environment advocacy, has robbed the discourse of personal relationships we have with the environment. In the ECO-CINEART film project, children were encouraged to tell their OWN stories of how THEY relate to the ‘environment’, not necessarily how it is defined in their school books. Each 4 day workshop, saw 20 children - equally divided between public and NGO schools, learning story telling and thinking skills through film making tools and attempting to make their own little films. The story selection, ideating, story boarding, the use of camera and all edit decisions, were done hands- on, by the participating children.

I felt as if I was a professional movie maker and I really thought as if I am the one who can change people’s opinion about the Earth. Palak Arora, New Era Public School.

Children as Authors

In the end we have a bunch of 10 short films, which are not just made by children, but in the purest sense, are authored and owned by these children. Films in which they have spoken their minds and given a slice of their lives and thoughts to the outside world. We adults, should be privileged that these children have invited us into their world and allowed us to participate in this process by asking us to witness, this unfolding of their minds through their films.

Krishnendu Bose

Managing Trustee, ECO

Delhi 2010