June 7, 2010 - 15 teenagers from different regions in Ukraine have gathered in the UN House in Kyiv this morning to start a five-day project that might change their lives and the attitudes of many other people. They all are directly or indirectly affected by HIV/AIDS and will produce 15 short videos, the OneMinutesJr, over the course of this week.

Yukie Mokuo, the UNICEF Representative in Ukraine, welcomes the participants of the workshop and tells them about a similar workshop held in the Eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk last year, where children of the same age successfully produced a series of videos on children's rights. "The films are so powerful", Mrs Mokuo says, "that we plan to have the films that you create this week shown at a huge international conference on HIV/AIDS in Vienna next month. And we will definitely also use them in November in a national conference on the same topic here in Ukraine."

More motivation comes from the fact that the films will all go live on the project website www.theoneminutesjr.org and that all participants are automatically registered for the annual OneMinutesJr award.

But back to the workshop: We drive to the Southern outskirts of Kyiv near the Dnjepr river, where the group will stay for the next five days to focus on the development of their film ideas, the filming itself and the final editing of the movies. After showing some examples of past workshops in Ukraine and beyond, the most important part of the workshop starts.

One by one, the participants have to present their ideas to the three trainers from Armenia, the Netherlands and Germany. This process is time-consuming, because most of the time the ideas are not clearly formulated yet and need a lot of soul-searching and additional brainstorming to be ready to be transformed into short documentaries or artistic videos.

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