The Norwegian nonprofit SOS Children’s Villages set up a candid-camera featuring a young boy, without a coat, freezing at a local bus stop. “If the 1.5 million people living in Manhattan fled their homes,” a caption in the video reads, “the world would notice.” 3. What if Manhattan were Syria? The Hamdi Foundation, a charity operating in conjunction with UNHCR, released a powerful video on regarding the plight of Syria’s millions of refugees. It depicts New York City’s usually bustling borough of Manhattan as a desolate, abandoned ruin - its crosswalk signals winking at no one, its subway cars empty of passengers. Don’t Panic said, “Our solution was to tell a story that would bring the realities of Syria home, and to do it we combined the one-second-a-day and photo time-lapse formats to create a new way of showing an ordinary girl’s world falling apart in just a year.” 2. The collaboration reframes the Syria Crisis in a Western context and aims to remind people that the violence in Syria is still very real. The video, created by Save the Children and Don’t Panic London, has nearly 50 million views.
You see her life transform over a year of conflict, with the ad concluding with the sentence, “Just because it isn’t happening here doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.” This campaign was modeled off of the popular “one second per day” format, where people chronicle a year of their lives or their children’s through one-second clips. So unlace your shoes and go ahead and step into their world. I guarantee you will see the current refugee crisis through a different lens after watching these videos. They will force you to imagine what the Syria Crisis would look like in New York City or London, to see what a year of conflict could do to a child, but most importantly to recognize refugees as ordinary people. The videos below all have one aim: to raise awareness for the refugee cause with a new perspective. By shifting the debate away from refugee statistics and refocusing on the attitudes of those who may not be sure who refugees even are, one can create connections through common experiences and increase understanding.
Luckily there are tools that can create a capacity to understand what another person is experiencing. Film has proven to be one of the most effective methods to create a sense of empathy and compassion.Īnother powerful tool to help an audience understand a situation is to re-frame it in a familiar context. Perhaps I’m naive, but I don’t think it is easy for everyone to comprehend the changes imposed on someone’s life once they’ve become displaced. Would you be able to imagine what life as a refugee would look like? Can you imagine the challenges and daily struggles you would face? Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard the phrase “Put yourself in someone else’s shoes.” It was one of the most common expressions my parents used when I was growing up as they tried to get me to look at a situation from a different point of view.Ī lot of people do think if you could just put yourself in someone else’s shoes for a moment, perhaps you would understand why life is not as easy as you seem to think.īut what about the lives of people in protracted refugee crises across the world? How simple is it for someone who has never been touched by this type of devastation and violence to actually imagine what life is like? Let’s try.
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