Palestinian-Lebanese “Shooting Hope” youth photography video

I am always a little dubious of those who hold strong opinions but seem absent the evidential underpinnings to support them. I talk to many people who seems absolutely sure about who is in the right in relation to the Palestine-Israel situation. These people often also opine about how Palestine’s neighbors treat the refugees to support their positions. However, if you probe you tend to find these house of card opinion sets are build on foundations of sinking sands. Many of the most vocal have never even visited the Middle East, have a very flimsy grasp of the history involved and rely on Western press for their information. I suspect that if they found out that someone expressing a strong opinion about Americans had never visited America, they would dismiss their opinion immediately. These people are often not astute enough to see any irony in that.

Well, for those who may have more interest in knowing more, the extract from the movie project, Shooting Hope, is worth watching. For those of you who haven’t been in the region, this fascinating photography project undertaken with Palestinian youth within the refugee camps and their Lebanese counterparts on the other side of the wire will give you more insight to conditions on the ground. Once again, I am both depressed about the actualities of the current situation and hopeful about the resilience of the human spirit under duress. Watch, listen, empathize and learn. That should be a maxim for life and especially so before expressing opinions with shaky knowledge to support them. The video takes a while to load but it is worth it…or follow the link to the original Al Jazeera article and watch it there if it won’t load for you.

The film Shooting Hope follows a project that uses photography to bring Palestinian and Lebanese teenagers together.

In this article, filmmaker Toni Oyry describes how the teenage residents of impoverished Palestinian refugee camps and their Lebanese peers are learning to see the bigger picture of their neighbouring communities through the lens of a camera.

Pictures of Baghdad flash across a computer screen in a small office in Beirut.

“Every picture you take stays in your memory, pictures are never forgotten,” said Ramzi Haidar, an award-winning Lebanese photo-journalist.

This was the start of our journey into the lives of Lebanese and Palestinian teenagers living in the coastal city of Saida in south Lebanon.

The two months we spent following Haidar took us from an office buzzing with volunteer photographers, journalists and artists, to the ancient souks of Saida and the narrow alleyways of Ain al-Helweh, the largest of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.

Al Jazeera English – Focus – Shooting hope