The Story of a Girl Project is a never before seen project that explores the HIV epidemic through both self-filmed, updatable stories and narrative professional filmmaking. The project explores nuance in the epidemic and adds to the wealth of information that can be found in data and journals.
The Project involves a mini-series of 8 professional short films portraying the life of women around the world who grow up living with HIV. The purpose of this is to show that measures that reduce HIV, such as access to medicine, will not rid us of the epidemic immediately but rather through generations of sustained care and programs. The narrative films are written and based off of real-life stories we have collected in each global region. We use actors and actresses to show the life of these women from their birth to adulthood (something that obviously cant be done with ease as a documentary). Whereas the self-filmed stories give us real-time insight into women living with HIV, the narrative films allow us to show the generational impact of access to medicine and HIV care.
The Story of a Girl Project invites anyone working on the HIV epidemic to share their story and their life with us – whether you are a person living with HIV, someone working to develop ways to overcome the epidemic, or simply a student. These stories should not only share what the person’s role in overcoming the epidemic may be, but also what defines them as a person: their sense of humor, personality, and individualism. The purpose of these first-person stories is to portray the individual battles each person has in overcoming the epidemic, as well as show that we are all human. By default, capturing someone’s story freezes it in that moment in time. Therefore, our unique web platform allows people to update their story as it changes, so we can see the impact, challenges, and victories of people involved in the epidemic over time. Self-filmed stories can either be submitted by individuals or by NGOs. For NGOs, we have a limited number of self-filming kits that we can distribute to our global partners. Please contact us for more information.