News and Diary
 

New Films and Workshops

A crew of some 40 of the world’s leading puppeteers and associated artists took part on the shoot of the three new No Strings HIV/AIDS films in May this year in New York.

The films are currently in post production, with plans underway to dub them and then host a workshop in Kenya later in the year, in which delegates of local partners in East Africa will learn hand puppet skills and learner-centred methods of utilising the films so that their ideas can be fully discussed and debated.

Filming of the Cyclone / Typhoon addition to the Tales of Disasters series for South East Asia has also been completed, with the new film now ready to be dubbed and then disseminated in the region.

We are now putting together plans to host an additional workshop in the region, which will involve partners from Indonesia, the Philippines, Myanmar, and Bangladesh.


No Strings Receives International Award

We were delighted to hear in December that No Strings' Tales of Disasters films have won a major international award, which we received in Budapest in March this year.

In conjunction with Trocaire, a leading Irish NGO that No Strings has partnered with on a number of programmes, the films have been accorded the World Aware Education Award from the Council of Europe.

The award recognises the global educational value of the project - both in South East Asia, and Ireland itself - following work by Trocaire to incorporate the films into educational materials for use in schools in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland.

We're now hopeful that we can increase the scope of this work, both to reach schools in other parts of the Western world, and to develop schools packs on new films like the HIV / AIDS series which is currently under development.


No Strings Documentary

No Strings had just registered as a charity in the UK when founder Johnie McGlade got a call from a film production company in Denver. Just Media were interested following the early development of the organisation - they'd come across it on Google, and the idea of following two of the main artists from the original Muppet Show on this fascinating new project intrigued them.

Since then, Just Media filmmakers have accompanied Johnie McGlade, Kathy Mullen and Michael Frith on various journeys to Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, as well as in London and New York.

The result is a 40-minute documentary that was shown to great acclaim at the Denver Film Festival in the USA in November 2008.