Role: Creative director, filmmaker & editor
Deliverables: Impact film

Ação Mineira – joy, in the children's own words

Ação Mineira para a Educação (AME) is a Belo Horizonte NGO founded in 2002 to educate and improve the quality of life of socially vulnerable groups. Its program Todos por Todos – educação além da escola runs free workshops in sport, culture, technology and health in partner schools, for every age group. AME wanted its sponsors and the public to see what the program does for the people in it, so I made The Meaning of Joy, a film in Portuguese with English subtitles.

I took the brief from an idea to a finished film, setting the concept as the meaning of joy, and built the story around one child's answer to what joy meant to her. I directed, shot and edited it, and kept the organization out of the frame: no narrator and no staff interviews, only the people the program serves.

In depth

The meaning of joy

What AME does for every age, from their first workshop to adulthood, told through the experiences of people who live it.

The Meaning of Joy. Portuguese with English subtitles.

Let the children explain

From the girl whose shy sister finally "unglued" from her to the teenager who says he would be nothing without it, the children explain in their own words what the workshops mean to them.

A girl at a doorway beside an older boy in a Todos por Todos shirt, Belo Horizonte

Visual evidence

Using a documentary approach meant observing in the background and capturing the program as it really functions day to day, and for the first time, its impact was told in the honest voice of a child.

A boy in glasses with a painted red nose and orange face paint at a workshop, Belo Horizonte