Shine-A-Light

In 2006, as a part of the Hip-Hop Education and Africa on the Street Projects, Shine a Light trained a group of ten young filmmakers from the favelas of Recife, Brazil. This group - which chose to call itself “CineFavela” - learned everything from how to write a script and prepare an interview to how to organize and edit a documentary, with some extraordinary results. Many other organizations have asked up how they can use the power of video to work with children, and our work in Recife provides the perfect platform to teach. In 2007, we will connect the knowledge of kids in Recife to the desire of other to learn cinema: with the CineFavela Project, the child film-makers will teach their craft to others, making this art into an integral part of the Latin American movement for children's rights.

Pé no Chão, the organization in which the young film-makers participate, believes that street education means creating the context in which marginalized children can teach others - and in the process, teach themselves. The members of CineFavela (most from 9-14 years old) have already selected a group of their peers, and they will teach the new group the process by which they learned to make movies. And as they teach - making lesson plans, watching movies, revising the work they did a year before - they're sure to learn how to do even better work.

In addition to teaching their own peers from the poorest and most violent neighborhoods of Recife, the members of CineFavela have also been asked to share their skills on the Xucuru indigenous reservation, where they will do an intensive, three day workshop for Xucuru children and then project the results for the entire village. Many of the children in the group have already traveled to the reservation to share ideas and experiences with indigenous children, and teaching film will only make the experience more profound. The result of their work will be the first example of our new series of programs for Indigenous children, Project 1925 (see page 35).

Why is film such a powerful tool for educating marginalized children? Though the question is simple, to answer it we have to return to one of the most difficult philosophers in Western history, Immanuel Kant, who showed that the “I” - especially in the famous phrase “I think, therefore I am” - is, in fact, double. The self is at the same time active as it reflects on itself (I think, I think about thinking) and passive as it is reflected on (“I am”). To become a moral agent, one who can act, but then criticize those actions and act in a different way, Kant believed that one must constantly live in motion between these two aspects of the I.

Making movies gives a concrete, material meaning to this philosophical theorizing, especially when children make movies about their friends, their families… and themselves. They become the “subject of the film” in two ways: first as the theme of the film, what it is about, and second as the agent of the film, the film-maker. Not only do the children come to know themselves, they come to know themselves in the process of knowing. They see themselves as actors and protagonists in their own lives, not merely as victims, and become self-conscious moral agents, able to think and act for themselves. The process encapsulates education… and what it means to be a person.

Video has several other important virtues for working with marginalized children.

Violence and inequality in the favela constantly threaten the trust and friendship that found a strong community, but the camera - especially in the hands of children - can counteract these pressures. The act of filming expresses importance and interest - “I want to interview you because you matter to me and to the community” - thus making people aware of the role they play in the lives of others. Equally important, children always show the video to the people they film, an act that shows trust and transparency and builds a bridge between people.
Digital video allows instant playback, and children love to watch what they have just filmed. This process helps with the reflection analyzed above, but it is also a powerful teaching tool. As they watch, children constantly evaluate themselves: “Look, I filmed the head too low in the screen; oh, it shakes too much here; wow, what a great angle you shot that from!” Children teach themselves through this rapid feedback loop, while they also hear the ideas of their peers. One can also erase and re-record a digital cassette, which helps kids to recognize that it is no big deal to make a mistake. Most education in poor schools carries the opposite lesson, and children come to fear the trial and error that lies at the basis of any real learning, so the lack of consequence of an error helps to overcome this problem. Kids teach themselves through video: not just teaching themselves to make a movie, but also how to learn.
In much recent film theory, academics talk of the camera as the tool that “structures the scene” or a space: in a movie, the camera is the unseen or absent center around which the world revolves. In a poor community, children play the same role, structuring both the daily activity of the neighborhood - child care, people gathering as children play in the street - and its discourse - even drug dealers justify their actions by saying “I am doing this so that my kids can have a better life.” -. In the community, however, though children may be the center, they are not intentional agents: the neighborhood revolves around what is good for them, but not what they want. The result is that children demand things, but don't recognize the consequences of those demands. In contrast, when a girl takes the camera in her hands, she knows that she is responsible for structuring the scene, and she comes to learn the consequences of her desire. Two people cannot be in the same place at the same time, only one person can speak and be heard, and only a certain number of clips fit in a five minute documentary. By making the “child centered community” real, the camera makes the child filmmaker into a responsible agent.

CineFavela will be an important step in transforming education in Latin America, and we're excited to be working with these children from Recife again.