Sussex student film shortlisted in Guardian Student Media Awards
A film by a Sussex student and his friend has been shortlisted in the Guardian Student Media Awards.
In September 2011, just before the start of their third year, Sussex undergraduate Joe Lord-Jones and his friend Spike Morris (a student at the University of Leeds) went to the West Bank to make a film about Palestine's bid at that time to join the United Nations as a full member state.
The pair travelled around the West Bank for two weeks, visiting locations such as Bethlehem, Hebron, Nablus and Ramallah and using social networking sites to find contacts and places to stay.
Joe, who was studying Politics and International Relations, recalls: “It was our first attempt at making a film this long [30 minutes] and our first proper experience in an Arabic country.
“We wanted to see how young Palestinians felt towards the UN bid and the Arab spring more generally.
“The film focuses on the idea that young Palestinians, although optimistic about the future, are still faced with the old hopelessness of their situation, reflected in the USA's promised veto of the bid.”
A year later, Palestine’s membership of the UN is still unresolved but Joe and Spike’s film (called Veto) has won them a place on the shortlist for Student Broadcast Journalist of the Year in the Guardian Student Media Awards.
Only two other entrants have been shortlisted in this category, for which the judges include Mark Austin, presenter of ITV’s ‘News at Ten’ and Jon Snow, presenter of ‘Channel 4 News’.
Joe and Spike have been invited, along with all of the other shortlisted student journalists, to attend an awards ceremony in the Guardian’s London offices on 7 November. From that date Veto will be available to view online.
If Joe and Spike win, they will get to spend two weeks at the Guardian. The experience would boost Joe’s efforts to pursue a career in broadcast journalism: he has just finished a three-week work placement at ‘Dispatches’ (Channel 4’s investigative current affairs series) and is applying for a place on a relevant trainee scheme or a postgraduate degree.
