A short film funded by the University of Kent, with Professor Gordon Lynch from the Department of Religious Studies acting as Executive Producer, has been shortlisted for the 2016 Sandford St Martin Trust Awards, which promote excellence in religious programmes.
The film, entitled For the Sake of the Child, explores British child migration schemes through which, over 100 years, churches, charities and religious orders sent children from poor backgrounds to live in countries across the Empire and Commonwealth. The people in this film are actors, but their words are direct quotes from the people who helped to set up the Child Migration schemes, or adapted from testimonies given by ex-child migrants to the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIA).
The film was developed as a educational resource, and distributed through the website TrueTube. This is the second TrueTube production in which Gordon has been involved, with a previous film on the Magdalene Laundry institutions winning a national Learning on Screen award from the British Universities’ Film and Video Council in 2014. For the Sake of the Child expands on Gordon’s research on child migrants, for which he curated the V&A Museum of Childhood exhibition ‘On Their Own: Britain’s Child Migrants’ this year.
To watch the film, please visit the TrueTue website here: www.truetube.co.uk/film/sake-child
The awards ceremony will take place on 8 June 2016. To see the full shortlist for the Sandford Awards, please see the page here: http://sandfordawards.org.uk/the-awards/2016-awards/2016-awards-shortlists/