It all started when I traveled to Northern Uganda with an organization that helps war effected children through soccer. After hearing the atrocities that happened to those children, I couldn't imagine how they still found a way to keep laughing like they do. Yet what I really wanted to know was not just the collective facts, but the individual feelings of the children going through that experience in their own words.
And so my plan was to simply make those children trust me and just listen.
My main challenge, apart from the limited resources of the village I was in, was getting David who was a shy kid affected by his past, to open up to me. To make him feel that I truly cared about listening to him just talk. And when he did bare those rawest of human emotions, it was an empathy between 2 human beings that I've never experienced before.
It's those raw human emotions that I aspire to portray as a documentary filmmaker, and portray them in a poetic form, through film, so that empathy I felt gets shared between us all.
Mohamed Soliman
solyjazz@gmail.com
