Six children from the tsunami-ravaged Nagapattinam district of Tamil Nadu have made a movie about how the disaster affected their lives despite never having seen a video camera before, a child rehabilitation group behind the project said on Monday.
The British-based Plan International said the aim of the 20-minute documentary was to ensure that the needs of children, one of the worst-hit groups in the tsunami, were given a voice. The movie was shown on Friday in Chennai.
The 2 boys and 4 girls, aged between 11 and 16, had never encountered cameras before being approached by the group to make the documentary, said Bhagyashree Dengle, executive director of the Indian branch of the group.
The 6 volunteered when the group went to the coastal villages and proposed the idea to affected families.
Nagapattinam was one of the worst-affected by the December 26 tsunami, accounting for 6,065 of the country's more than 10,000 deaths. At least 17,000 families were left homeless in the district.
"We used (the) film as a tool to ensure the voices of children are heard and taken seriously in any tsunami reconstruction effort," Dengle said in an interview.
The movie titled 'Tsunami: Before and After' details how children were easy prey for the waves of the tsunami, as well as disruption to the schooling of those who survived and their living conditions in temporary shelters, she said.
The boys, Sobarnath and Arivazhagan, and the girls, Padma Sivaraman, Manisha, Roja Ramani and Pakya, took 10 days to make the 20-minute documentary under guidance from renowned Bollywood filmmaker Govind Nihalani.
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