Sudden Flowers’ Collaborative Process

Sud­den Flow­ers pro­duces short films on the lives of youth in Addis Ababa who are grow­ing up with­out par­ents thanks to the AIDS cri­sis.  The col­lec­tive is made up of 18 youth and sev­eral project direc­tors.  The youth write and shoot their own sto­ries.  By explor­ing their per­sonal nar­ra­tives in a con­trolled and sup­port­ive envi­ron­ment the youth move through destruc­tive emo­tions like shame and guilt encour­aged in a soci­ety frag­mented by HIV/AIDS.  They learn to see their dif­fi­cult past expe­ri­ences as exter­nal chal­lenges that they have over­come rather than reflec­tions of their char­ac­ter or capa­bil­i­ties.  In addi­tion, act­ing in each oth­ers films as par­ents or other fam­ily mem­bers encour­ages the youth to reex­am­ine the sit­u­a­tions of their own fam­i­lies.  They often develop empa­thy where before they felt angry and betrayed.  The pro­duc­tion of the films is a ther­a­peu­tic process and an oppor­tu­nity to gain tech­ni­cal and cre­ative skills.

The youth also pro­vide a valu­able ser­vice to Hope for Chil­dren, the umbrella orga­ni­za­tion that Sud­den Flow­ers started under.  The films offer infor­ma­tion about the per­spec­tives and needs of the youth as defined by them. Sud­den Flow­ers seeks to inte­grate the films in to the report­ing mech­a­nisms of the orga­ni­za­tion. This is where their approach dif­fers from other youth media projects.  The impact of the ser­vices and pro­grams offered by the aid orga­ni­za­tion can be sized up in rela­tion to the nar­ra­tives told by the youth.  The dis­sem­i­na­tion of the films inte­grates the youth’s per­spec­tive into the plan­ning and eval­u­a­tion of the orga­ni­za­tions help­ing them.

Tra­di­tion­ally, orga­ni­za­tions like Hope for Chil­dren use sta­tis­ti­cal and text based medi­ums to doc­u­ment and report on their activ­i­ties.  Visu­als come into play as sta­tic, posed pho­tographs or straight pho­to­jour­nal­ism of pro­ceed­ings of the orga­ni­za­tion.  Sud­den Flow­ers sees the films they pro­duce as a rich way to pref­ace the voice of the ben­e­fi­cia­ries in report­ing on the orga­ni­za­tions accom­plish­ments and a means of gaug­ing needs and plan­ning future programs.

When I came, Sud­den Flow­ers was just set­tling into a new office space.  They now have plenty of room for work­shops and pro­duc­tion.  The youth came on Sun­days to run skill shares among them­selves.  A few of the youth a pretty adept on the com­puter and gen­er­ously help the rest, whose skills might be stronger in act­ing or pro­duc­tion.  Toward the end of my time there, I ran pho­to­shop work­shops on a one-on-one basis intro­duc­ing such con­cepts as lay­ers, his­tograms, and color the­ory.  These images are from the infor­mal skill shares they were work­ing on when I first arrived.