Shooting Hope
One project helps Palestinian and Lebanese teenagers to overcome division and crime.
Filmmakers: Toni Oyry and Farah Durrani
Ain el-Hilweh is the largest camp for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.
Military checkpoints guard the entry points, and the Palestinian community inside rarely engages with the Lebanese one on the outside.
Declining living conditions, political instablity and unemployment in and outside the camp have deepened the mutual mistrust between the Palestinian occupants and the wider Lebanese population.
The resulting frustration and anger is often channelled destructively into radicalism and crime.
Shooting hope is the story of an extraordinary project that brings together Palestinian and Lebanese teenagers who live their lives on different sides of the divide by teaching them the skills of digital photography.
Witness follows boys and girls from both communities as they take their cameras home and reveal, through their photography, how they see their lives as they navigate between the violent religious, ethnic and political divisions that scar the country.
For some of these youngsters it is a break in a life without hope for the future. For others, it is the birth of an ambition to work as a journalist or photographer.
Shooting Hope aired first in December 2010.