Students for Teaching Peace

Is a youth-driven coalition of thirty-two high school students who attended the Youth to Youth Peace Conference in Serbia during March break of 2005. Many of them were also in film and video classes run by Greg Albers and Jana Bayer-Smith and making a documentary about their experience became one of many goals of the trip.

Filmmakers’ Teresa MacInnes and Kent Nason became involved with the group and agreed to act as mentors to the 20 students interested in this aspect of the project. Teresa and Kent held several workshops before the students departed which helped them to establish four working groups, each having a theme upon which to concentrate their filming during their trip – video diary, youth issues, adult issues and visuals. They were interested in finding similarities and differences between Canadian and Serbian youth and what causes some people to be peaceful while others choose violence. While the video diary group concentrated on members of Students for Teaching Peace, the youth and adult groups planned to ask questions of the people in Serbia about the war and how they dealt with conflict. The visuals group planned to concentrate on capturing moments and images that reflect Serbia today.

The National Film Board of Canada supplied the students with some sound equipment and 4 small digital cameras. CBC Atlantic also came on board and supplied digital videotape to the project and also offered to help with some editing. Because this project grew out of a screening of Teaching Peace in a Time of War at the Viewfinders Youth Festival Program of the Atlantic Film Festival, the festival invited the students to screen some material at the ViewFinders: International Film Festival for Youth, April 19-23, 2005. This would happen just three weeks after their return from Serbia.

As documentary filmmakers Teresa and Kent felt that they too had to be more involved. They purchased some tape and prepared their own equipment to record the trip. They started their process by interviewing all of the students and adults involved in the trip. They asked about expectations, fears, motivation and process of raising money. During the trip, the students shot 40 hours of tape. Kent and Teresa shot about 40 hours of tape and also conducted post interviews with all the students upon their return.

The next phase was preparing a short video for the ViewFinders International Film Festival for Youth. The students picked four people to work for five days in the CBC Studio with editor Ron McLean. Sarah Dubé, Harrison Newman Jardine, Nik Hamm and Kelly-Lynn Russell worked night and day to come up with the seven-minute trailer of Hope for the Future. Katy (with a y) McDougall also participated in the narration script with Sarah Dubé. Entirely shot, directed and written by youth, Hope for the Future is the first effort on the part of the students to share their experience in Serbia.

Currently, Teresa MacInnes and Kent Nason are working with their own footage and the footage selected by the students to create the feature version of Hope for the Future. Once they have an assembly of the strongest footage they will work with some of the youth who will help to shape the direction of the documentary. This will be possible because of CTV Television Network, who have pre-licensed this program to play across Canada upon its completion.

We would like to thank the following partners who supported the documentary aspect of this initiative: ViewFinders: International Film Festival for Youth who helped us to publicize events and screened our short video; the National Film Board of Canada who provided cameras for our trip and who will be profiling us on their website CitizenShift (http://citizen.nfb.ca/onf/info); and the to the CBC Atlantic Television Studio who provided us with videotape, editing facilities and with an editor.