I am a Venezuelan.  While I was giving classes to my students in India through 2014, the Venezuelan regime was taking students like mine into jail for protesting. Torture, murder and persecution were the news of the day through the accounts friends and fellow citizens could get across through social networks, in spite of the tight censorship the Venezuelan government had on the media.

I was distressed and my students were moved by the stories of horror that came through the internet.

Realizing that a particular country’s problem is in fact something that is relevant to all humanity, I then spoke to my students about the issue of human rights in a very passionate way, as I was in pain for what was happening in my country. I could see each and every one of this young faces being tortured and imprisoned in my country in the nativity of my students in India.  I could not make my problem theirs, but I could arise their awareness on the issue of human rights. I asked them to choose a problem that would concern them and asked them to research and write scripts. They chose themes ranging from farmer suicide, female feticide, human trafficking and child soldiers to LGBT rights and dowry related violence.

The brief asked them to create a short piece around 2 minutes long. Based on their own scripts, they then designed the look + feel  and final storyboards,  which they proceeded to animate. The whole production process in a workshop that took two weeks. Research and initial design had been done before during another two weeks of off-class assignments.