The Power of Storytelling for Social Change

By Ian Frank, Ecuador ’15, Watson University Incubator for Social Entrepreneurship

 

https://vimeo.com/shortdog/yayathewiseman

 

“The culture of my father is being lost, the jungle is sick, the native people are sick, my father could die from the sickness he has.”

 

When I applied for Global Citizen Year during my senior year of high school, I said explicitly that one of my goals, with seven months in Ecuador, was to create a meaningful documentary. Now, over two years since I made that commitment — my movie Yaya the Wise Man has premiered at festivals in Montana, New York City, and San Francisco. In the last week it registered nearly 15K views online.

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My ambition to create an international documentary was unleashed as a child thumbing through the alluring photos of National Geographic. The first risk I took with a camera was crappy stop motion animation in my basement summer before seventh. The process obsessed me. An itch I couldn’t scratch. In high school I studied advanced film for two years and learned the mechanics of film analysis. Yet, what was omitted from my experience was a sense of my own story.

 

I initially choose Global Citizen Year for the opportunity to be in foreign environment because I thought “this is what will make me special”. However, the emphasis that Global Citizen Year placed on storytelling was tremendous and I learned to think differently about what makes a story “special” – not in terms of “exotic” locales, but in terms of authentic, responsible and compelling storytelling. At the very first week of Pre-Departure Training,  documentary filmmaker Ian Slattery set a provoking agenda. The art of powerful questions.  What are the elements of a good story? How to act responsibly as storytellers? Why is storytelling crucial to the individual’s experience?

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I don’t have all the answers and anyone that claims to is naive of the stories we all carry. What I know for certain is this — our stories matter. Human empathy is at the core of change. Our lives – our world constantly shuts us off from one another but storytelling unlocks that empathy.

 

My goal – with ethical storytelling – is to reject the single story’s dangerous effects on our perception and explore the intricacies of the human condition to convey our courage, adversity, and defiance. Curiosity is innate. Listening well – takes practice.

 

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Click here to watch Ian’s film Yaya the Wiseman.