English Language Fellow Katy McAlary ran an Access camp in Kolkata, India, where she taught the 100 participants about leadership, film, and screen writing. McAlary’s lesson on leadership ended with the participation of youth activist and film industry expert Sadia Akhter Aurna, who traveled to Kolkata to teach various audiences about digital storytelling and social activism.
Aurna spent six hours with the students and taught them how to create a story arc, who plays what role in film-making, and how to adequately shoot and edit a short film. The women shot footage about empowerment and showed what it means for them to be Indian both personally and within their communities. One participant remarked afterwards that “we all have stories to tell, and now we know how to tell them.”