This year at the Big Chill, Massive Attack are collaborating once again with the Hoping Foundation in order to raise awareness and support for young Palestinian refugees.
Hoping stands for Hope and Optimism for Palestinians in the Next Generation. It provides grants to community associations working with children in the refugee camps and supports a number of scholarship programmes. The activities they sponsor aim to improve all aspects of their lives, giving Palestinian children the opportunity to learn, to play, to build their lives creatively, and to express themselves through art, photography, film, music, theatre, dance and sport.
The Hoping tent at the Big Chill, kindly provided by Festival Republic, will be screening a variety of films created by and about young Palestinian refugees. A documentary about the launch of an online yearbook, created by Hoping for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), shows how tens of thousands of young Palestinian refugees at UN schools will be able to communicate with each other across borders. Screens will be showing films made by young Palestinians from the media unit of Lajee Centre at ‘Aida refugee camp, near Bethlehem. It will also be screening video messages from young Palestinian refugees living in Gaza, recorded especially for the Big Chill Festival, where they speak about their hopes and dreams. Hoping will be recording videos of people attending the festival so they can send back messages to the young people of Gaza.
The Big Chill will also see the launch of a longer term Massive Attack-Hoping initiative; a recording studio, to be built in one of the many Palestinian refugee camps, hopefully in Gaza. With the support of Massive Attack and other artists, the studio will provide young Palestinian refugees with the opportunity to create and record music and work with other artists from around the world.
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