WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUNG PEOPLE CALL "ACTION"

Sofia Snow grabbed the mic, paused, looked out into the audience, took a deep breath and began. In her own unique rhyme and metre she delivered a poem, like a long, lyrical and very personal sentence, about speaking “broken” English. It made for a fitting finish to a screening of "Youth Producing Change", a series of nine short films by young filmmakers around the world, which had its British premiere at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in London. The films were curated in partnership with Adobe Youth Voices, a youth media outreach programme of the Adobe Foundation.

Snow was one of six youth directors who attended the London premiere at Brixton’s Ritzy theatre, where they fielded questions from the audience afterwards.

One middle-aged viewer pointed out that none of the films featured interviews with mainstream politicians. He asked the directors if they saw this as a sign of political disengagement among young people. Snow, who was 17 when she made "The Countdown", a film that addressed the attacks of September 11th, fired back: “Conventional politicians always get the mic. This was our chance to have the mic. We’re not disengaged, we’re engaged.”

“I would have liked to have interviewed George W. Bush for my film, but that wasn’t really gonna happen,” joked Zack Lennon-Simon, an 18-year-old Brooklyn native whose film, “Playing With the Other Tigers,” captured the way the September 11th attacks affected his Muslim childhood friend. “There was a kid named Ben in our middle school who was not nice. I think I made my film for Ben, to show him he’s a real dick idiot. And then I realised there were a lot of Bens out there, and many of them in positions of empowerment.”

Each film had a different feel, vibe and approach. Some, such as “Slave Label", a film about sweat-shop labour created by philosophy students at Queen Elizabeth School in Cumbria, were quite polished. Others, like “Islands of the People”, about a girl’s relationship with her Haida grandmother, were more rough and ready. But even without all the bells and whistles of Final Cut Pro editing software, each film effectively and powerfully addressed social and cultural issues from very personal perspectives.

“The True Cost of Coal” investigates the effect of the coal-mining industry on families, while “The Hidden Cost of Cashmere” explores clothing manufacturing with humour. After hearing so many of his peers talk about missing fathers, Mthobeli Lithiko, a 19-year-old from South Africa, decided to make “Women Empowerment”, a film about South Africa’s strong, single mothers. “I Want My Parents Back” addresses immigration from the perspective of three American-born siblings whose undocumented parents are forced back to Mexico, while “A Maid is Not a Slave” dramatises youth labour issues in Senegal.

The directors were all clearly excited to be showing and discussing their films. “Who knew, writing poems all these years, that I’d be in London, talking about them, for free?” Snow laughed.