Regards, Terhi

(Click the image to see the work)

The public discussion on bullying has been active during the past weeks. Aamulehti published on a cover of their Sunday edition a letter of an 8‑year old, who is being bullied in school. A very touching letter.

Some cynics have questioned the authen­ticity of the letter. I understand this also to be a defense mechanism to deal with something you really do not want to think about. And while I do think that authen­ticity in matters such as this is of utter impor­tance (for the credi­bility of the media), these expres­sions of doubt should not mask the impor­tance of the issue.

Bullying does happen. Every day. That should not be the case. We should try to do our best to do something about it.

And it bears with it consequences which might be felt several decades later.

I hope this piece contri­butes something to the ongoing conver­sation and shows something about the depth of the issues we are dealing with.

I was speechless the first time I saw it.

Background

Some weeks ago I was teaching a course called Intro­duction to Journa­listic Multi­media and Video — a joint project of Lahti University of Applied Sciences and Aalto University.

I gave a simple homework for the weekend: “Shoot a story. Short. Anything, but it has to be a story”.

After classes on Monday one of the students asks me to give a hand with her editing. And she shows me this. I am not easily shut down — but I was quiet for a long, long time. (You can see my immediate reactions in a post I wrote for DocImages).

I origi­nally made a trans­lation and embeded the video into a page as a part of a speech I’ll be giving in June in a confe­rence for freelance journa­lists. As an example of how the most simple visual story­telling can be extremely powerful — if your story is true and your subject of universal impor­tance and value.

But because of the subject matter, I feel it should be shared with a wider audience. The piece remains in Finnish, but there is a subtitled version included. I tried different solutions (VoiceOver, dual text…) but this was the best I could come up with.

I am still stunned when I see Heli’s work.

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I have asked the author of the piece (Heli Kaskinen) for her permission to show this. The video remains under her copyright.