Striding Edge Community - Young Womens Film Academy
Haus is helping coordinate a community project with film production company Striding Edge Films. The Young Women's Film Academy helps empower young women carers, aged 13-18, to realise their thoughts and ideas through documentary film.
The project follows on from the 2009 Young Women’s Film Academy project in which teenage girls trained as an all female film crew to make a film about the young carer identity. During the project they uncovered a theme very personal to them – the complex relationship with the mothers they care for.
The Academy members now want to work as a film crew again, inviting more girls on board. The want to make a film but also want to look at media portrayal, self-esteem, misconceptions and mental health.
The girls will be facilitated, trained and mentored by a mix of female film professionals through Striding Edge Films (Striding Edge Community’s sister company), women’s therapeutic practitioners and support workers from Barnados.
A core group of 9 girls will lead the project. This group will do peer-to-peer learning with splinter groups of young women from Barnardos Teenage Pregnancy Unit and the Cyrenians. These sessions will enable wider groups of young women to have a go on cameras and contribute to the themes of the film.
The 9 young women will learn camera operation, cinematography, story creation and script-writing, sound and editing, to make their own short films about their relationships with their mothers.
The films will premiere in Newcastle in February 2011.
The Young Women's Film Acadmey is funded by First Light and Northern Film + Media.
Photo credit: Yago Veith