Serbia | Croatia | Montenegro | Bosnia and Herzegovina

Dear friends,

Encouraged by the success of our last years’ “Empowering People – Ideas Worth Spreading” working conference held in Montenegro and your positive evaluations, Civil Rights Defenders and Youth Initiative for Human Rights Serbia have the pleasure to invite you to a new series of trainings.

Video is most often seen as the most influential tool to spread human rights stories and a representable format to reach people online and offline. Having this in mind, Civil Rights Defenders and our partners from Youth Initiative for Human Rights Serbia have decided to focus on video as a tool for human rights advocacy.

Supported by the Swedish Institute, „Video for change“ video – sprints are a new format, on which you and your associates will participate on an intensive video production training and will compete to create best video materials on human rights related topics you choose and find relevant for your countries and cities.

These ideas may be linked to your current activities, or be a reflection of your observations about relevant stories from your surroundings.

Four separate events will be held in Pristina, Belgrade, Tirana and Sarajevo and will include training and a 48 hour video – sprint session.

On the video – sprint session, you will be joined by video professionals of your own choosing, or the one’s assigned to you according to your needs and ideas you propose. In 48 hours, your task will be to create five short (up to one minute) and one longer (up to five minutes) video using your mobile phones and/or tablets. By insisting and limiting the production activities on devices accessible to everyone, we want to make sure that every team has the same starting point and no one is privileged.

After all four events are completed, we will organise simultaneous screenings of all materials created during the events – „200 minutes for human rights“.

Since the number of participants is limited to 20 per country (10 activists and 10 video professionals) we want to encourage you to send us your ideas on the topic you wish to present and capture.

We are looking for warm, attractive, representable stories portraying real people and the difficulties they encounter due to their ethnicity, religion, sexuality or any other personal attribute.

When representing your idea, please include specific problems, people and locations in no more than 500 characters with as much details as you can. You can apply by sending an email to Marjan.maruna@civilrightsdefenders.org or by filling in the online form.

Upon receiving your idea, Civil Rights Defenders and Youth Initiative for Human Rights from Serbia will evaluate them and invite selected teams to participate on the video – sprints.

Think about your audiences, think about your beneficiaries and most of all – think creative!