A Ground Breaking Documentary

Review of the HumaniTREE Documentary

On the 28th October, Urban Circle an independent youth arts organisation based in Newport previewed it’s ground breaking documentary HumaniTREE. Urban Circle is a renowned charity which engage, support, and empower young people and communities. The HumaniTREE documentary is just one of the many projects that is youth lead, but this project focuses on young people gaining insight, skills, and ownership in media.

Under the leadership of Nuakai Aru, who is a film maker, led the young creative team through the process of researching, filming and all other aspects of digital and technical skills required to creating a production. The project consisted of a workshop with Nine Black Films. Hosted at the University of South Wales, where the creative team, took part in a RnD week, learning research skills, the power of film, the impact of the media and stereotypes as well as the art of documentary making and how they can be used as powerful ways to share a message.

The documentary previewed at Cineworld Cinema, at Newport Retail Park, with a full audience, consisting of VIP’s invited to share in the unveiling of a year long project in the making. As an introduction some of the young people, who were a part of the creative team, first described the benefits of the experience. They explained that taking part in the project helped them socially as well as professionally, to build on skills they already had, whilst developing new knowledge and understanding in areas of science, anthropology, and history.

They also touched on the importance of education and variable narratives, when exploring topics on race and history which, for them was missing during their experience of school. The creative team, worked closely with academic researchers, who are in the field of genetics, human race and African migration. Such as Anthropologists, Dr Sarah Abel and John Hawks (USA), Turi King a Geneticist, Robin Walker a Historian aka The Black History man and Abu Bakr, supported the creative team throughout, to ensure there was balance and enough information for them to do a critical analysis of the existing migration theories.

The documentary begins, by highlighting the catastrophic effects of climate change and the relationship with the planet and humanity, as well as recent world affairs, like the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter Movement. Narrated by Nuakai, who is also an actor, poses the question. ‘How did we get to where we are now? We live on a planet with so many social and environmental problems, what is our true history and what is our collective story’? You can view HumaniTREE online FREE for 48 hrs, airing on the 3rd – 5th December. Visit www.humanitreedocumentary.com