A film made as part of Plan’s award winning Make the Link, Break the Chain anti-slavery project is to be shown at an international film festival in New York at the end of June.
In the Youth Producing Change section of the Human Rights Watch Films Festival, A Maid is not a Slave will be shown alongside a selection of projects from across the world.
All nine films are written and produced by young people who expose the issues they face in their own communities which infringe upon their human rights.
Plan’s A Maid is not a Slave is due to be shown at the festival over June 20 and 21 and was produced by students from Mariama Ba School in Senegal, a girl’s boarding school in Senegal.
The film was written by the students, who are based on Goree island – a renowned place in Senegal which is home to the House of Slaves, a museum set up to illustrate the horrors of the slave trade.
Plan worked with the National Museums Liverpool and Aduna connecting schools along the triangular slave route as part of the Make the Link, Break the Chain project. Pupils from Brazil, England, Haiti, Senegal and Sierra Leone worked together using the internet and explored what slavery was and how we can safeguard liberty in the future.
The film was financed by Plan and the Senegalese pupils given media training in video production, script-writing and editing so they could put the story and film together themselves from what they had learnt.
The five-minute long drama concentrates on the story of Kiné, a young Senegalese girl, who is sent to the city to work as a maid to support her family back home. When her employers begin to abuse her, who should she turn to for support?
Collaborative project
Produced in the framework of Plan UK’s anti-slavery project called Make the Link, Break the Chain, A Maid is not a Slave was screened at the Liverpool Slavery Museum in 2007 for the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade.
Head of Communications at Plan UK, Sharon Goulds said the film had been chosen for the festival from 250 submissions from across the world.
“The project was an example of really good international cooperation and we are really pleased that the achievement of so many young people has been recognised,” she said.
Other issues that will be looked at during the festival are Mexico immigration policies that separate families, child labour in clothing factories in India and the harsh realities faced by young mothers in South Africa.
The Youth Producing Change festival will be screened at the Walter Reade Theatre in the Lincoln Centre in New York on June 20 and 21st. The filmmakers themselves will also be there to meet the audience and introduce the submissions.
