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ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Mariah Timm watched the video of the Syrian boy in the refugee camp 50 times, probably more, as she sat this fall at an audio workstation at McNally Smith College of Music.
The 19-year-old composition student wondered what kind of music should accompany footage of a child forced from his home by civil war and who makes kites out of Styrofoam food packages. Sad? Brooding? She watched the boy's face and his energy as he and friends ran across the dusty yellow desert trailing a kite with a blue tail. Timm decided the music should sound hopeful.
"The stuff this kid has been through, and he's only maybe 10 years old, it's just really tragic that something like that has happened to him and his family," Timm told the St. Paul Pioneer Press (http://bit.ly/1lhT7Zt ). "But the video isn't all heavy.
It's just some kids playing around in the sand and flying kites and getting excited about it."
Timm is one of a several-dozen students and instructors at the St. Paul music college who created soundtracks to nine short documentaries filmed by Syrian teenagers about their lives in the Za'atari Refugee Camp in Jordan. The collaboration gave the Minnesotans a glimpse into a conflict that has forced half of Syria's population from their homes.
In mid-November, the completed videos were screened in the camp, and the Syrian teens and the music students in Minnesota exchanged smiles, waves and a few words in translation through the Internet.
In the wake of the Paris bombings as the world debates refugee resettlement, the personal documentaries are also, in their small way, a message from the Syrian teens.
"The residents of Za'atari live in a fishbowl," said Aaron Wagner, whose Washington-based nonprofit Voices of the Children produced the film project, and who responded via email from Jordan after the screening. "Media outlets go in and out of the camp, grab their sound bites and footage and leave as fast as they came.
"They do stories on the kids in the camp, but the kids themselves don't have a means to tell their own story. Our purpose was to provide them a means."
McNally's connection to the Za'atari Film Project evolved out of Wagner's friendship with McNally vocal instructor Shon Parker. The two men grew up together in Mount Vernon, Washington, outside Seattle, where Wagner is a middle school music teacher.
Wagner created Voices of the Children to enable his and other students in the U.S. to collaborate on art projects with young people living in areas of conflict. This summer, he traveled to Jordan with two Syrian filmmakers, Moe Majati, based in Dubai, and Faisal Attrache, from California. They spent three weeks teaching 20 Syrian teenagers how to create storyboards and record video with iPhones.
"Aaron told me about the project and I said, 'I want to help you!'" recalled Parker, who was home visiting his best friend in Washington this summer. "We were hanging out and he was looking for ... music online. I said, wait, I literally make music for a living. I can do this!"
Parker recruited faculty at McNally Smith and the project ultimately involved nine music-composition students, plus musicians and production engineering students who spent three days recording and many more hours mixing and editing.
"Most of our students don't even know what's going on in Syria," Parker said. "They're busy developing their craft. They're insulated. So, when we first showed them a picture of the camp, you kind of saw their jaws drop."
About 80,000 people live in Za'atari Refugee Camp in northern Jordan, just a fraction of the millions displaced. It is as if the population of Duluth fled to the desert with suitcases and in over three years erected a dense city of tents, portable trailers and metal huts inside a chain-link fence. Children make up half the camp.
Save the Children, one of several U.S.-based international aid groups working in Za'atari, provided the film group with permits, transportation and an interpreter.
The McNally students got to choose which video they wanted to score.
Timm was drawn to a four-minute piece about a boy who teaches his friends to make kites. It was filmed by the boy's older sister and two other Syrian young women, though Timm did not know that when she started. The video opens with a quiet piano and a sweeping view of the camp. The boy talks about knowing no one when he arrived at camp two and a half years ago, then meeting other children and teaching them to make kites. There is one sad moment, when the boy mentions a friend killed by a missile in Syria, which Timm underscores with a haunting female voice.
"We had a general discussion in class about what the mood should be," Timm said. "We really wanted to have that balance. This is an awful thing that's happening, but there is that little spark of hope."
"All the assignments I've had before are 'pretend you're scoring a film,'" she added. "This felt like a lot more pressure, but totally more meaningful. A lot of us wanted to push the extra mile to make it the best we possibly could."
The Syrian teenagers filmed everything from dust storms to children filling plastic jugs from water tanks and watering tiny gardens. McNally Smith senior Carter Lange created a mostly guitar soundtrack to accompany images of a young man named Mohammed dribbling a soccer ball and coaching a team of young boys.
"It's an uplifting story about how he has this great opportunity to still teach kids, and still enjoy the sport he loves, even though he's stuck in this camp," Lange said. The 21-year-old Minnesotan coaches swimming at Simley High School in Inver Grove Heights and said he felt an affinity for the twenty-something Syrian coach.
Mohammed mentions family still in Syria and a friend who died in the war. But he ends with this: "Sports is a message of peace, love and good manners. ... Second, if there is a will, persistence and a goal, you'll always achieve your dreams."
After working closely with the videos, the McNally students were eager for the screening in Jordan.
A handful of them gathered at 4 a.m. at the college to participate in a live streaming of the event online. Across the world in Jordan, several-dozen Syrians gathered around a projector and portable screen in a white fabric tent strung with strands of lights.
"The first question our students asked was, of course, what did you think of the music? Did you like what we gave you?" Parker said. "The Syrian kids were all talking at the same time, so it was difficult to translate what they said, but the main takeaway was they couldn't believe some students from America were willing to write music for their documentaries. There were lots of smiles. It was pretty great."
All nine videos will be collected into a longer film titled "My Dream, My Right," which will be posted at votchildren.org in December. Parker plans to hold a public viewing in Minnesota.
Save the Children is talking about creating an arts hub in the camp with Wagner's group, and there may be future collaborations with McNally Smith. Lange and the McNally students are excited about the exposure, and the potential to have their names roll in the credits at a couple of international film festivals. But ultimately, they don't want people to notice the music.
"I'd much rather that they pay attention to the story," Lange said.
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Information from: St. Paul Pioneer Press, http://www.twincities.com
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