For Angkatan Zaman Mansang (AZAM) Sarawak’s Youth Engaged in Social Innovation, Service, Education and Enterprise (YES I SEE) project, participants are always expected to come up with something unique and innovative.

 

Apart from that, the youth are expected to come up with creative ideas, which they believe would help to benefit the society in Sarawak.

 

One of the YES I SEE groups, which calls itself ‘Sarawak Documentaries’, has decided to take on this challenge by – as the name might suggest – producing documentaries on Sarawak.

 

Their idea and approach is to find exceptional youths from all over the State and highlight their achievements through videos.

 

For a start, they have chosen to focus on three youths in Kuching, namely a budding entrepreneur, a young film-maker, and a very promising young athlete.

 

The young entrepreneur highlighted in the pilot video tells of how a 19-year old’s self-belief and perseverance has helped to carry him forward in his quest to succeed in the business world.

 

As for the young film-maker, the documentary shows her passion for her craft and her ambition to make a difference in this world, through her films.

 

The third youth highlighted in the documentary depicts a girl who has worked her way through to become the No.1 ranked player in her age group, in Sarawak.

 

According to the leader of Sarawak Documentaries, 18-year old Jof Raika Total, by telling the story of these youths, his group hopes the effort will help to motivate Sarawakian youths to pursue their dreams and dare to achieve great goals.

 

“Basically, we just want to motivate other youth to do what they want to do and be successful; in a way, to help Sarawak in terms of youth development,” he said.

 

Sarawak Documentaries is made up of five members, aged between 18 and 19 years.

 

With none of them possessing any experience in video production, much less in producing documentaries, they found it tough to carry out their ideas in the initial stages.

 

However, with the help of the two mentors assigned to them under the YES I SEE project, and also with the guidance of a local video production house, they started to get the hang of the process and clearly enjoyed the work they were doing.

 

The group hopes to start a larger initiative soon, as part of their next step in coming up with more videos and documentaries, not only for the local market, but for a wider international audience.

 

After presenting their business plan to the organisers of the YES I SEE project in the middle of last month, it was clear that AZAM believed the group had great potential.

 

AZAM is also confident in Sarawak Documentaries’ core ideas, especially in coming up with something “for the youth, by the youth.”

 

More importantly, as with the other four Kuching groups in the YES I SEE project, AZAM has helped the youths in Sarawak Documentaries see the vast possibilities, not only in developing themselves, but in helping their community and their society, as well.

SRWK DOCUMENTARIES(KUCHING)