The Seattle International Film Festival will debut “Water Problem,” a photo essay produced by students of the American India Foundation’s Adobe Youth Voices program illustrating the challenges of getting fresh water in urban slums of India. The film addresses the problems surrounding water in Kusumpur Pahadi, a slum in South Delhi, India. The film documents the story of a young boy getting ready to go to school, who is unable to because he must fetch drinking water from a government water tanker, which comes only once a week. The film highlights the difficulty of people in the area to obtain drinking water and how young children spend entire days struggling to fulfill their basic needs instead of going to school, studying and playing.

“Water Problem” is made by eight students, ages 15 to 17, who have used this platform to bring awareness about the issue in urban slums. “The big problem in our area is shortage of water,” explains Raja Paswan, 16. “Through this project, we got the chance to show the problem of our personal life.” Neehtu, 17, remarks that “my experience was great and I learned a lot. We have a number of problems in our society that we got a chance to showcase.” While bringing awareness about social causes, the students have gained technical production skills like photo editing, story boarding, narration and mind mapping.

Seattle International Film Festival, one of the largest film festivals in North America, screens extraordinary films from around the world across all genres. This year, the three week film festival opens on May 17^th and will go on until June 10^th.

http://www.siff.net/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=45618&FID=254

The American India Foundation (AIF) is the largest US-based diaspora philanthropy organization focused on India. Since its founding in 2001, AIF has raised and deployed more than $75 million to support its programs that have impacted the lives of 1.5 million of India’s most impoverished and marginalized individuals in the areas of education, livelihoods and public health. President Bill Clinton serves as Honorary Chair and Nobel Laureate Professor Dr. Amartya Sen chairs the Advisory Council. AIF provides a nationwide platform for collective philanthropy with chapters in New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, New England, Chicago, Los Angles, and Washington DC.

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