Selecting the Winning Ideas

After each contest, the winning scenarios are selected by juries made up of former contest winners and other young people, specialists in HIV prevention, treatment and care, people living with HIV, and experts from the realm of film production.

In the 2005 selection process, a total of 234 people from 203 different organisations served as jurors at the national or international level. In many cases, the selection process provides organisations working in the same area with an opportunity to get to know one another and to collaborate directly for the first time. The participation of individuals from a range of different fields creates a forum for rich debate, with jurors able to learn from one another's unique perspective.

Jury members have discovered that the scenarios provide remarkable insights into the thoughts, ideas, language, and perspectives of the young people. They see the selection process as a valuable means of assessing young people's needs and of evaluating the communication work around HIV/AIDS that has been carried out to date.

The average SCENARIOS FROM AFRICA juror reads over 100 creative works on HIV/AIDS by young people. The entries are also discussed at length by groups of jurors. Through this process, jurors are able to identify areas where young people have misunderstood important messages, and to formulate ways to adjust the response to the epidemic so as to take young people's views and needs into account. After studying the scenarios, many jurors identify ways to apply their newfound knowledge in the context of their own work. The jurors' findings are also compiled in a report on Jurors' Observations and Recommendations for wider circulation.

When jurors are asked how they have benefited from the selection process, their most common response is that they have been able to evaluate the impact of HIV-related activities to date. That evaluation might apply to the overall efforts of the HIV community in a given country or zone, to the programmes of an individual organisation or school, or to their own work in the field. The selection process is a way for jurors to identify geographic zones that require special attention. Those who serve on international SCENARIOS FROM AFRICA juries have the opportunity to compare the relative strengths and weaknesses of HIV-related efforts in various countries.

The thousands of creative, often highly imaginative works contributed by the contest participants are a unique goldmine of information for researchers, prevention specialists, trainers, members of theatre groups, and so on. During the selection process, jurors invariably express dismay over the fact that only an extremely small percentage of scenarios will be turned into a SCENARIOS FROM AFRICA film. They come across many creative works that they would like to make use of in their programmes. Jurors are actively encouraged to do just that, as long as the young author is always prominently acknowledged and none of the scenarios is used in a for-profit venture.

Typically, the group of people who state that they have learned the most about HIV/AIDS in the course of jury work are those who work in film production. SCENARIOS FROM AFRICA juries include directors, producers, scriptwriters, actors and actresses, and costume designers. Each year, one or more of the internationally acclaimed directors who go on to transform the winning ideas into short films is a member of the final selection jury.

A team of filmmakers has transformed some of the winning scenarios from the contests into a collection of 28 films, each between 2 and 15 minutes long. Wherever possible, the young contest winner works with the director and production team during the film production process.