Organization: TBD
About
Students participating in the Cape Town, South Africa IFP hope to have 3-4 short documentaries (10-12 minutes each) produced by youth about their lives. Per IFP faculty Sean Jacob’s suggestion, these documentaries will focus on the politics of post-apartheid cultural memories and identities, and may work with South Africa’s “Born Free Generation” – youth born after 1990 that were not exposed to formal apartheid government. Another possible avenue will be to focus content around public health issues, specifically HIV-positive youth.
This project hopes to achieve the following objectives:
1. Maintain/develop infrastructure, networks and relationships in Cape Town to create a sustainable site for New School students to return to each summer.
2. Promote the videos as (human rights) advocacy pieces – finding outlets and festivals to help make their stories visible. The MTV youth-curated youth media festival will be a big part of this step. Entrance into festivals could also open up scholarship opportunities for the students.
3. Work with first year GPIA students to train them as interns for Reel Lives to promote The New School’s philosophy of combining practice with theory. Also prepare the fellow students for IFP work in either Cape Town or Rio.
4. Figure out ways to incorporate the new content from Cape Town (and possibly Rio as well) with curriculum Reel Lives is currently developing with Scholastic. We would also like to think about ways to facilitate cultural exchange through the sites and content.
5. Continue internship work at Reel Lives to develop a one-on-one mentoring program to match New School students with Reel Lives students.
