Something amazing happens when a kid takes a video camera in his hands for the first time. I’ve seen it with child soldiers, street kids, indigenous kids deep in the Llanos of Colombia. A new world opens up, as if they had suddenly grown a new eye and had to take the responsibility to use it well.
Shine a Light doesn’t make movies: we help marginalized kids to make their own movies. And the results are far more powerful than anything a professional filmmaker could create. The angles and colors and almost-too-intimate close ups that an eight year old Sáliba girl shot of her great grandfather, the tribe’s greatest maker of arrows; the way a child soldier framed a battle scene against the clouds of the Bogotá sky; a ex-street kid frightened by his return to the tunnels under the city of Córdoba where he once lived.
Shine a Light has helped marginalized children to tell their stories in over 60 films, including two fictional movies and two feature length presentations. Several of these films have been featured in prestigious festivals in Latin America.
In 2008 and 2009, we’re working on several new projects: with immigrant children in the southwest of the United States, with children from the favelas of Florianópolis, with indigenous children in La Paz and the islands of Kuna Yala, and with pre-schoolers in Rio de Janeiro.
For more information, see www.shinealight.org
