The session immediately after lunch brings together what the StrangerFestival calls Simply the Best, three very different examples of best practice of working with youth and video.

Maren Siebert presents
Bekijk ‘t , (Dutch for Watch it) which connects young people in a very direct way with art and culture and supports them in their own creativity.
It aims to give marginalized young people access and a first positive experience with culture. One of the examples mentioned is Strada, the story of young street artists, with twentysome clips or scenes including dance, theatre, film and photography and is loosely based on Fellini’s La Strada from 1954.
Lidia Makowska from Kultura Miesjka presents her organisation, which is one of the 14 partners of the StrangerFestival under the banner Freedom is everyone’s happiness.
Kultura Miesjka’s mission is to work with arts and culture towards social change, using all possible tools to increase democracy. The consider themselves as an observatory from the margin trying to influence the mainstream. They investigate new means of artistic expression, exploring new ways of collaboration and aiming to build a new community spirit. They joined the StrangerFestival project a year ago to explore two topics which are linked to their mission:
- Exclusion linked to inherited poverty
A topic that was explored through a project with young people in collaboration with schools discussing issues of poverty.
- Exclusion linked to immigration
A topic that lead to a participative video project with the marginalized and nearly invisible Vietnamese community in Warsaw.
Lidia stresses that her organization uses contemporary arts practice not as means for leisure. According to Kultura Miesjka, arts have a very important function in picking up and discussing topics that will remain untouched otherwise.

Artist Tarek Atoui introduces the Empty Cans project
As a video-software programmerTarek Atoui started the Empty Cans project in 2004. It allows (young) people to play and produce audiovisual content together in a process of collective learning.
In 2005, when the Palestinian refugee crisis worsened, he adapted his idea of a collective workshop linking up Libanese & Palestinian young people. The circumstances under which refugees are living and the workshops took place can at best be described as difficult

In his arts practice as well as daily life he is confronted with and addresses misconceptions between East and West. Collaborations are still very difficult to accomplish with many cultural and sociological misconceptions.

Although the three projects operate under very different circumstances and in environments that are difficult to compare, the three presenters discuss if there are any common rules to engage with their target groups when using with new media. Issues range from social/religious taboos, self-censorship (Tarek) to aversion to arts and culture, and therefore also mistrust towards media (Maren), whereas Lidia regards new technology tools as valid as any other medium.

All three agree that the driving force for participation and interaction needs to be the content rather than the tools. And even if their projects can’t change the world, all of them make a contribution towards social change within their own environment - and hopefully beyond.