[press release from Community Prophets]
Young people from urban Sydney are the stars of Burn, a groundbreaking, gritty improvised drama about juvenile crime and life on the street.
The Attorney General of NSW, the Hon’ John Hatzistergos, will be officially launching the project in Sydney next week. The stars of Burn will attend the screening, along with prominent lawyers, filmmakers and leading members of the Sydney legal and human rights sectors.
The 34-minute film Burn, and an accompanying website to be launched later this year, are part of a landmark crime-prevention initiative being run by Legal Aid NSW. Burn tackles a major crime issue in NSW and uses improvised scenarios to engage urban youth and help them to consider the consequences of their behaviour.
The story centres on a group of youths who commit a typical juvenile robbery offence, which escalates into violence. It covers themes such as youth violence, and its common precursors, alcohol and illegal drugs, as well as public-space policing and legal responsibility in situations of group behaviour.
The cast of 11, plus two production trainees, were recruited through youth services across Sydney. The ethnically diverse group of inner-city kids aged between 16 and 20 participated in a 10-week crime-prevention filmmaking program, which targeted at-risk youth. The film was shot on location this year in the Sydney suburbs of Bankstown, Campsie and Padstow.
The project is directed by internationally acclaimed Australian filmmaker, David S Vadiveloo, and produced by Community Prophets, a company that established by Vadiveloo that draws on his decade of experience working with marginalised youth.
“We are focused on inspiring young people to value and assert their unique voices through creative expression,” Vadiveloo says.
“This was a potentially risky project because there were very real tensions between some of the ethnic groups that we cast from,” Vadiveloo says. “But our Community Prophets model works because the process is collaborative—the cast guides the film and their identities are never threatened. In that environment young people quickly realise they have more in common than they thought.”
While carefully directed, the cast worked without a script and improvised the way scenes unfolded, based on what they felt was real and believable.
“What distinguishes this drama from other Australian television is that it uses the real dialogue and rhythms of young people on the street – it wasn’t created by screenwriters or actors trying to represent young people. And because there’s nothing manufactured about it, young audiences really respond to it.”
Burn has already changed lives, with one cast member, Ali Haidar, landing a lead role and six others appearing alongside him in a new feature film.
Vadiveloo also created the groundbreaking Us Mob series, Australia’s first Aboriginal television and web series for the ABC, set in the town camps of Alice Springs.
The Community Prophets model, in which at-risk young people collaborate with experienced filmmakers to bring their stories to the screen, has also been adopted in Canada and the United States.