“This is an idea whose time has come,” says Mrs. Shirley Hanna, Executive Director of Nice Time Productions Limited, a Jamaican independent film company. Mrs. Hanna is aiming for no less than a shift in the paradigm of how the world perceives children and their rights and protection, much like the shift in mentality that occurred with slavery.

In wars, revolutions, famines and floods and other disasters, children and women are always the ones who suffer the most, as they are the most vulnerable. So Mrs. Hanna and the Women of the World Coalition are launching an ambitious project: a documentary called Voices of the Children.

“I’ve been travelling and thinking about this concept for quite awhile,” Mrs. Hanna says, “talking about the atrocities on children as an idea whose time has come…We want to get children to speak about the atrocities they’ve experienced…We need to take the bandaid off and go to the source.”

Too often, children’s voices go unheard in disasters and conflicts, and Mrs. Hanna, whose daughter is Jamaican Youth and Culture Minister Lisa Hanna, is determined to produce a documentary of children telling their stories, in their own voices. She was alerted to this phenomenon of a lack of rights and a voice by daughter Lisa, when she came to her as a five-year-old, asking why 75 per cent of the world’s population who died from hunger were children. “She told me that the adults weren’t doing a very good job.”

Children are the most vulnerable, says Mrs. Hanna, and it is time for them to have a voice. The documentary is at the proposal stage and the Coalition is seeking funding. Mrs. Hanna will employ Nice Time Productions to film it.

Nice Time has already produced some of the nation’s most well-known documentaries, which often incorporate a socially conscious narrative. The most recent is Songs of Redemption, an award-winning documentary produced by Fernando Garcia-Guereta about the power of music programs in federal penitentiaries to rehabilitate inmates. The documentary has recently been approved by the Ministry of Education to be shown in schools and has also aired at dozens of international film festivals.

Mrs. Hanna’s background includes a range of disciplines, including communications, public relations, event planning and marketing. In 1990, she lead the World Hunger Project and was a volunteer with the inaugural Meet the People program launched by the Jamaica Tourist Board. Mrs. Hanna was also active in her daughter’s life as past president of the Queen High School for Girls Parent-Teacher Association.

For this upcoming project, Mrs. Hanna intends to travel the world, recording children’s voices and aiming to no less than change the global mentality when it comes to how young people are perceived. “By the end of the century, we want atrocities ended.”