Hollywood stars silent as Syria sizzles

 Sean Penn (right)  joins Egyptian actor Khaled al-Nabawi and protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square in Sept. 2011.  Penn and other stars have been pilloried for silence on Syria. Photo: AFP/Getty Images.

In its own way, Hollywood is a political platform – not to mention a springboard for celebs like Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But Syria has tied some of the most prolific tongues in Tinseltown, in spite of an agonizing two years of murder and mayhem, much of it by the ruthless regime of Bashar Assad.

Still, as Washington was loudly rattling sabers at Syria this week, we might have heard the odd outburst from TIFF celebs like George Clooney, a vocal critic of failure to staunch the suffering of Sudan. Susan Sarandon, a noted anti-war activist, was also silent.

The Hollywood Reporter, not known for its probing geopolitical analysis, went on the hunt for comments from more than a dozen red-carpeters and came up empty-handed. Sarandon was “unavailable for comment,” (though she told the Daily Beast Syria was "tricky.")  Likewise silent were libertarian comic Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller. And anti-war toughie Josh Brolin. And fellow Iraq protester Tim Robbins.

Many have been pilloried by the American right as un-American and unpatriotic for speaking out against George W. Bush’s war. Now they’re skewered again as “hypocrites” for keeping stum on Barack Obama’s threatened strikes on Syria.

The silence is suprising. From the McCarthy era Hollywood blacklists to the Vietnam protests, to the bare-knuckled rhetorical brawls over Iraq, famous Hollywood voices have been raised, and sometimes harshly silenced on volatile political issues.

But super-celebs like Barbara Streisand, “Hanoi Jane” Fonda and anti-poverty rock star Bono have stayed out of the Syrian fray. Even Martin Sheen, and Sean Penn -- who joined Egypt’s Tahrir Square protests -- have been uncharacteristically tight lipped.

Why the reticence?

Hollywood veteran Ed Asner – no stranger to protest and arrest --  puts it down to fear of racism against a black president, as well as sluggishness, disorganization and Obama's sudden rush to war, which caught the anti-war faction with its placards down.

“It’ll be a done deal before Hollywood is mobilized,” Asner grumbled to the Hollywood Reporter. “This country will either bomb the hell out of Syria or not, before Hollywood gets off its ass.”

And, he said, protest fatigue set in after Iraq, when Bush and his backers were never called to account. But Obama’s dismal record on inequality, corporate power and cyberspying has also alienated rather than energized his onetime Hollywood supporters.

“People aren’t getting active because ‘who gives a s---? ‘ is essentially the bottom line,” he said.

Not so Madonna, however. On her Instagram account she posted a graffiti-like message, “U.S. stay out of Syria.”

Rapper-songwriter Azealia Banks also broke ranks, and silence, on Twitter, saying that “America should mind it’s (sic) business this time.”  But she added later, if another world war is inevitable, “can’t we just wait until AFTER I drop my album in January?”

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, human rights and politics from the former Soviet Union to South Asia and the Middle East. She’s never been to Hollywood.








       

Whither Snowden? whistleblower's whereabouts a guessing game

No Snowden:  packs of disappointed reporters line up for a glimpse of fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden, in Sheremetyevo airport this week.  Photo: Reuters/Maxim Shemetov

   
He’s noodling around in Hong Kong. He’s basking on the beach in Ecuador. He’s wandering a Moscow airport, like a younger, blonder redo of  The Terminal's Tom Hanks.

When it comes to America’s most wanted whistleblower, Edward Snowden, nothing, it seems, is out of the question as the news spins on hour by hour. In the latest turn, Russia’s foreign minister said he had never crossed the border, while President Vladimir Putin maintained he was in a Moscow airport transit zone. 

Where is he really? Here are a few ideas.

Beijing: in this made-in-Washington version, Snowden is a long term Chinese operative who couldn’t wait to be repatriated to his spiritual home. That would put the seal on the U.S. charge of treason, and end the whining from those Frappuccino-sipping freedom of expression types.

Of course, Snowden hasn’t done himself any favours by telling reporters about American cyber-attacks on China – or that he deliberately took a job with contractor Booz Allen Hamilton in order to get access to worldwide lists of what the National Security Agency hacked.

Moscow: in the Hollywood version, a hapless Snowden is in an old KGB holding cell in Sheremetyevo airport, being done over by Russian spooks armed with advanced truth drugs and videocams.

Upbeat ending: he escapes with the aid of a beautiful Russian cosmonaut who handily flies him to the moon.

Downbeat ending: he spills the secrets, drinks some polonium tea, and dies. Moscow informs Washington the problem is solved. All’s well that ends well – except for Snowden.

Cuba: in the Graham Greene version, Snowden disguises himself as a journalist, joins the hack hunting pack on the Moscow-to-Cuba flight, and slides into a life of threadbare freelancing, recycling tidbits from seedy Havana bars and downloading masses of American conspiracy theory websites for Castro’s secret service.

Ecuador: in the truth-or-fiction version, Snowden is lionized as a Quito hero until he reads up on the media crackdown laws, sends an open letter to President Rafael Correa and winds up in jail. Correa refuses to extradite him because he disapproves of Washington’s authoritarian stand on freedom of expression.

Mumbai: in the Bollywood version, Snowden is smuggled onto an India-bound plane with a counterfeit passport, takes a top job with a high tech company and supervises the outsourcing of every remaining IT job in North America. And he even learns to dance!

Olivia Ward has covered conflict, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to South Asia and the Middle East. Her latest World Weekly story was on Big Data: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. 

      

Canadian diplomat involved in Argo skeptical about Iran's new moderate president

A U.S. hostage is paraded by his captors in the compound of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran, in November 1979. (AFP/Getty images)

In the weeks before six American diplomats were snuck out of Iran on Jan. 28, 1980, using fake Canadian passports, fake identities had to be created, documents had to be forged, and nerves needed to be calmed.

The matter of teaching the Americans how to "talk Canadian" fell to Roger Lucy, ambassador Ken Taylor's political officer in Tehran.

"We covered everything from 'eh' to 'zed," Lucy said in an interview. "We were a bit lucky because all of the Americans came from the northern U.S. and their accents weren't that different from ours, with the exception of one woman who was from Virginia.

"We basically kept going over their cover identities, where they were from, where their visas were issued, stuff like that," Lucy said.

By now, the event that inspired the Oscar-winning movie Argo are well-known.

On Nov. 4, militants in Tehran broke into the U.S. embassy and six American diplomats escaped and sought shelter with the Canadians. The U.S. rescue mission, "Operation Eagle Claw," saw the Americans create a bold cover story in which their diplomats were given new identities as Canadian filmmakers scouting for a location for a new sci-fi movie.

Until they left the country two months later, the Americans were hidden by Taylor and his Canadian colleagues.

It's worth re-reading Jim Coyle's interview with Taylor about Argo's shortcomings and it's also worth noting that Argo director Ben Affleck didn't only offend Canadians with his Hollywood treatment.

Lucy was among the Canadian diplomats who spoke Farsi in Iran at the time. He spotted a mistake on the Americans' forged visas that could have been disastrous.

The Iranian new year begins with the spring equinox, meaning that while the western world considers June the sixth month of the year, it's usually considered the third month on the Persian calendar, Lucy said.

"It could have been a big problem for them at the airport," he said.

Lucy, now 65, is retired and living in Ottawa. After retiring from his government job in 2004, Lucy spends his time traveling and writing trade books primarily on old Canadian military vehicles.

"The one I'm working on now is on the Ram tank, a Canadian designed and made tank that went from inspiration in 1941 to production in 10 months," Lucy said. "It wasn't designed as a combat tank, but was a great armed personnel carrier and munitions carrier."

It's hard to imagine that there aren't many days when Lucy isn't asked about Tehran.

"The Americans left at about 7:30 in the morning and we found out later that morning that they had made it out okay, even though their plane had been delayed a bit," Lucy said. "The Iranians called me later that morning and asked if we could have a discussion about air negotiations since they were no longer allowed to fly to the U.S.

"I said I would love to but I was leaving on holiday to Europe and asked to re-book for the next week," he said. "We destroyed our cypher machines, met with a few other western diplomats who were in the know and left Tehran at about 4 p.m. the same day."

Lucy says it wouldn't "be prudent" for him to return to Iran but he still watches political developments there closely.

"I'm guardedly skeptical about its future," he says.

While Iran's newly elected president Hasan Rowhani has pledged a more moderate approach towards the west, Lucy said he's heard that message before.

"The real power there lies with the supreme leader and the security forces with the revolutionary guard," he said. "Frankly, I'm skeptical that we'll see real change."

Lucy said he thinks most Iranians support the government's pursuit of a nuclear program, in the same way most Indians supported that country's efforts in the 1970s.

"It's worth remembering during the Iran-Iraq war that Iran suffered from attacks from weapons of mass destruction to which they could not respond," he said.

Lucy is scheduled to give a speech on his diplomatic career on Thursday night at 8 p.m. at the Royal Canadian Military Institute in Toronto.

Rick Westhead is a foreign affairs writer at The Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead

 

Metropolis aims to soar over Canada's Superman record

Metropolis--where else?--hopes to wrestle the crown for most Supermen in one place from Calgary this weekend. (Photo courtesy of Metropolis Planet)

If you are into Spandex and kinky red boots, you might want to fly down (by airplane, we presume) this weekend to the small Illinois town of Metropolis.

The appropriately-named location is hosting its 35th Annual Superman Celebration, with autograph signings, a live theatre show and contests.

One of the featured superstars this year is none other than Canadian actress Margot Kidder, best-known for her role as the inteprid reporter Lois Lane in the Hollywood movies of the 1970s and 1980s.

Metropolis (the Illinois version) got its name way back in 1839 --  long before the Man of Steel left Krypton. But it has been trying to cash in on its name for more than three decades.

And this Sunday, Metropolis will try to win back an honour that was stolen by Canada: the Guinness World Record for the Largest Gathering of People Dressed as Superman.  Who knew, huh?

Metropolis, naturally, set the record in 2008 with 122 people, only to be topped first by a U.K. contest and then in 2011 by Nexen Inc of Calgary Alberta.

The company rounded up 437 employees all dressed in the identical Superman costume to launch its "Be a Superhero" campaign for the United Way -  you can watch a YouTube video of the event.

Organizers of the Illinois festival say this year they want to bring the record "back to the United States and more importantly to Metropolis Home of Superman."

It's not as easy as just donning cape and some boots. Official rules state the costumes must have "the blue body suit, the red and yellow 'S' shield on the chest, the yellow belt, the red cape, red boots and the red trunks."

Participants also have to stand in place for 10 minutes, which can take superpowers of your own in a twitchy crowd.

In case you were wondering which outfit to bring out of your closet, apparently both the "Classic Superman and Superman Returns" costumes are considered acceptable.

No word yet on whether you can wear the get-up to be revealed in the new Man of Steel Hollywood blockbuster coming out on June 14.

Julian Sher is a foreign affairs and investigative reporter for the Star and can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @juliansher 

Lights, camera, action: stars buff up Chechnya's on-screen image

 Elizabeth Hurley attends a news conference in Chechnya's capital Grozny, earlier this week. Hurley will star alongside with French actor Gerard Depardieu in the drama, titled "Turquoise, " that will be directed by French filmmaker Philippe Martinez. (AP Photo/Musa Sadulayev)

“A tale of tragedy, betrayal, lots and lots of mayhem and finally, sweet bloody revenge.”

The modern history of Chechnya? No, a media description of the French-Russian thriller, Turquoise, starring curvaceous British actress Elizabeth Hurley, and lumpy formerly-French actor Gerard Depardieu, now on a permanent tax holiday from Paris in his adopted homeland, Russia.

The film’s biggest casting coup is Chechnya itself.

Russia’s southern banana republic is soon to be a glitzy backdrop to a thriller that aims to eradicate those grittier Hiroshima-like bombing images, massacres, firefights and filtration camps that did so much to undermine its star quality during two brutal wars. Not to mention more recent attention as the place of origin of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers.

 “I followed everything that happened here and saw a city totally rebuilt and very sympathetic people,” Depardieu told reporters from the Chechen capital Grozny, where he is a “very close friend” of warlord leader Ramzan Kadyrov. He is also making a Russian-produced film on Chechnya's post war reconstruction.

Kadyrov’s own hard man image got the soft-lens treatment when Hurley was photographed next to him, cuddling his white kitten, nostalgically named Chanel. And he has taken to posting “almost adorably kooky” pix on Instagram, recently posing benignly alongside another apparent close friend, martial arts film actor Steven Seagal, who gave an impromptu folk dance performance in Grozny.

It won’t be the first time Kadyrov has tried to punch up Chechnya’s image.

He’s imported top-flight footballers for exhibition matchers. And most notoriously, invited action star Jean-Claude Van Damme and Oscar-winning actor Hilary Swank for lavish  national celebrations in Grozny two years ago that coincided with his birthday. (Kadyrov formally opposes public birthdays to avoid accusations of a Stalin-like cult of personality.) After viral, and virulent, media reports, Swank apologized, insisted she knew nothing of her host’s allegedly dubious human rights record, and reportedly fired her manager on return.

This time, Hurley and Depardieu are making no excuses. If they had earlier doubts they could have consulted any number of human rights groups -- like Memorial, whose Chechnya monitor, Natalya Estemirova, was kidnapped and murdered in 2009. Kadyrov’s regime has been accused of pursuing its enemies to foreign countries, killing six of them in Turkey alone. Allegations of human rights abuses fill the files of advocates who can only do their dangerous work outside of Chechnya.

Depardieu, at least, won’t be apologizing any time soon. His new BFF, President Vladimir Putin, personally handed him a Russian passport after he quit France in a dudgeon over a 75 per cent tax on millionaires. He now has registration papers for a new flat in the Soviet-style city of Saransk, capital of the Russian republic of Mordovia, where he plans to open a restaurant.

The region, he rhapsodized, has no oil or gas, but “rich people who make their wishes come true in life.”  Except for Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who was denied parole last month from a Mordovian penal colony where she’s serving a two-year sentence for a brief protest in a Moscow cathedral. None of the punk group has been invited to perform in Grozny.

Olivia Ward covered the former Soviet Union from 1992-2002, including Russia’s two wars with Chechnya. She collaborated on Shelley Saywell’s film A Child’s Century of War, which was based on her reports, and listed for an Academy Award.

Big Data is watching you, and you, and you

Fact or fiction? Scene from the 1955 British movie of George Orwell's 1984 resonates today, though many sophisticated systems of government snooping are invisible to the ordinary citizen.


There’s an elephant in your room – and it never, never forgets.

It’s Big Data, and, says Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, co-author of a book by the same name, it is “A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think.”

From cradle to grave (and even before birth) we’re tracked, trailed, photographed, videoed, scrutinized, biometrized, analysed and….you can see where this is going.
 
Mayer-Shoenberger is a fan of Big D for its ability to put together information that connects patterns we could never understand from smaller bits and bytes. He also has some warnings about what can happen when staggering amounts of personal data are put together to map our lives in a virtual human cybergenome.

Q: Is Big Data just Big Brother writ larger -- an era of total surveillance?

A: There are two important elements. One is the obvious fact that we’re collecting more information than ever before and most of it is in a digital format. That creates a much more comprehensive capability of surveillance.

Q: And the other?

A: It takes the quality of ephemerality out of our communications. We used to depend on things we said or did being plausibly deniable. They would go away. We could say they never happened. Now that’s much more difficult.

Q: What happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas?

A: If you look at Facebook and Twitter, the younger generation uses them as an ephemeral way of communicating. They don’t realize it doesn’t disappear like water cooler gossip. What I say will stay with me and may be used against me in the future.

Q: And the effect on behaviour?

A: What’s happening goes beyond surveillance per se. In the past, watching was done in the same time frame. Now it’s the panopticon. That was a prison in which inmates didn’t know if they were being watched, so they had to assume they were watched all the time. That created compliance without active watching.

Q:  No escape?

A: There’s a “data shadow” following us that transcends time, which is new. And this may freak you out, but in the Big Data age there’s an even bigger problem, our vastly increasing reliance on probability.

It means calculating propensities based on probabilities. We’re using all that data to predict a 90 per cent likelihood that the person standing in front of us is going to commit a crime next week. So punish him now – like Minority Report. Or take him into an interview and persuade him not to do it.

Q: This isn’t science fiction. Ordinary people in Britain have been arrested because surveillance data predicted they might cause trouble during the royal wedding.

A: Right, and in the U.S. there’s “predictive policing” in a number of cities. They use Big Data analysis to determine where and what time crime spikes. But this is deeply troubling because profiling becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

Olivia Ward has covered conflict, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to Europe, South Asia and the U.S., winning national and international awards.

The real life flappers who would have been at Jay Gatsby's parties

The Great Gatsby film adaptation debuts today at the Cannes Film Festival with hundreds of celebrities. In these bland times few of the blonde, tanned clones on the red carpet would be a match for the 1920s flappers who truly were originals and the forefront of great social, political and cultural change.

Sure they threw off their corsets – for the first time in centuries women could do so – cut their hair and danced the Charleston while drinking champagne. But they also lived through turbulent times including World War I, segregation and the Great Depression.

Here are a few real life flappers who would have been on the dance floor at Jay Gatsby’s wild parties:

Zelda Fitzgerald: F. Scott Fitzgerald called his wife Zelda the first American flapper.  Zelda was a writer and novelist, known for her book "Save Me The Waltz" but eclipsed by her more famous husband. They had a dysfunctional marriage – Zelda was an alcoholic and in last years of her life hospitalized in a mental institution. Her biographer Sally Cline told The Observer: "Her melodramatic life was in real terms the stuff of fiction.”

 American author F Scott Fitzgerald dances with his wife Zelda Fitzgerald and daughter Frances.  (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Josephine Baker: She was the exotic, American-born dancer who found fame and fortune on the Paris stage. Baker cleaned houses for rich white families in St. Louis, Missouri before becoming a chorus girl and dancer, according to her estate’s website. She went to Paris to dance in La Revue Negre which made her an overnight sensation, all long glossy limbs, uninhibited movements and exotic skirts made from feathers or banana skins.

She was of course trading on the European public’s racist perceptions of Africans – she once dryly said “since I personified the savage on the stage, I tried to be as civilized as possible in daily life."

A poster for a Josephine Baker movie. (Star files)

Tamara de Lempicka: Her Art Deco paintings captured the Jazz Age with all its style and refinement.  The Polish born artist lived at the centre of bohemian Paris life, painting the rich and famous. Her friends included Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau. Author Judith Mackrell has written that de Lempicka would snort cocaine from a silver teaspoon to help her stay up all night partying or painting.

But these women were no airheads, either. De Lempicka spoke six languages and at the age of 17 helped her lawyer husband escape the Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg, Russia, according to her official website.  During WWII, Baker worked for the underground French Resistance against the Nazis, then went on to adopt 12 children she called her “rainbow tribe” because they were from all over the world.

Hamida Ghafour is a foreign affairs reporter at The Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour

Whistleblowers still battling the odds to do the right thing

They can't help sticking their necks out: giraffes in Tanazania's Lake Manyara National Park. (Photo: Christian Jensen)

“You know how to whistle, don’t you?” says Lauren Bacall’s famous line from To Have and Have Not. “You just put your lips together and blow.”

If only it were that simple.

For whistleblowers, who go up against corporations, governments and organized criminals, it can be the most difficult decision of a lifetime.

John Graham, director of Giraffe Heroes International – a U.S.-based group that celebrates those who stick their necks out for the common good – says that although there are some advances to help whistleblowers, in some cases it’s also getting harder.

“Technology makes it easier, because it’s easier to uncover the nasty stuff that’s going on,” says the retired American diplomat. “The hard part is that in the U.S., for instance, employers are trying to get access to employees' emails.”

And he adds, “the bottom line is it still takes a lot of guts.”

That’s clear from the treatment of U.S. soldier Bradley Manning, who was locked up in conditions human rights advocates have called torture on suspicion of sending classified government emails to WikiLeaks. Or the fate of Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who died in a Moscow jail after blowing the whistle on a huge alleged tax fraud scheme.

Neither is on the giraffe list. But many lower profile giraffes are sticking their necks out every day, and paying a heavy price. Graham himself was put on a no-fly list by the Bush administration after Sept. 11 – and in spite of his diplomatic connections has never been able to find out why, or remove his name.

On the Giraffe Heroes database is an exhaustive list of ordinary people who have sacrificed much to do what they believe is the right thing.

Like Zimbabwean Farai Maguwu, who documented the brutality of President Robert Mugabe’s security forces when they attacked poor “illegal” miners and local civilians in the country's diamond fields. He was imprisoned for six months and is under constant surveillance. But he continues fighting for justice and a fair share of Zimbabwe’s rich resources for all its people.

Or lawyer and environmental activist Meena Raman of Malaysia, who stood in front of tractors to stop dumping of radioactive waste in areas that were home to 10,000 people. She was thrown into jail, but the offending company closed down.

Or Justine Masika Bihamba, whose life has been threatened and family forced to flee the dangerous eastern Democratic Republic of Congo because of her ongoing campaign to seek medical, social and legal help for women who have been savagely raped.

Or Northrup Grumman Corp. comptroller Jean-Francois Truong of Los Angeles, who went up against the aerospace giant in court with allegations of fraud, including huge cost overruns on the B-2 bomber,. He exposed the misuse of public money, embarrassing the company and the government.

These are just a few of dozens of people whose courage earned them a giraffe citation. For readers looking for hope and change, the website should be required reading. It’s a bracing change from the often dismal news of the day.

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to the Middle East and South Asia, winning national and international awards, including the Michener Award for public service journalism.


  

Native American tribe plans to dub Star Wars in Navajo

This 1977 publicity photo provided by 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation shows, from left, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill in a scene from the film, Star Wars. 

A perennial question facing scientists and researchers is how to save endangered species, like plants or animals, and languages on the verge of extinction.

Now someone has come up with a unique idea, at least to save one language: to dub a classic Hollywood movie in it.

The largest Native American tribe in the United States is looking to dub Star Wars in Navajo to help preserve the native language.

A Reuters report says that fluent Navajo speakers have been invited for a casting call in Window Rock in northern Arizona to dub the roles of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia and others.

Manuelito Wheeler, director of the Navajo Nation Museum, told Reuters that he first came up with the idea 13 years ago as a way to preserve the consonant-rich Navajo language, believed to be spoken by about 170,000 people, according to government figures.

“We thought this would be a provocative and effective way to help try to preserve the language and at the same time preserve the culture,” Wheeler told Reuters. “What better movie to do this than Star Wars?”

Wheeler said he believes the popular science fiction movie will resonate with the Navajo people with its universal theme of good versus evil.

The project was given the go-ahead about 18 months ago.

Endangered languages are on the brink of extinction. According to UNESCO, a language is endangered when parents no longer teach it to their children and it is no longer used in everyday life.

A language is considered nearly extinct when it is spoken by only a few elderly native speakers.

UNESCO lists 577 languages as critically endangered.

RELATED: Dying languages: scientists fret as one disappears every 14 days

Raveena Aulakh is the Star's environment reporter. She is intrigued by climate change and its impact, now and long-term, and wildlife. Follow her on Twitter @raveenaaulakh

Crowdsourcing for climate change

Would you like to know how climate change is affecting peoples' lives in Africa? Do you want to hear about it from the people who live there?

Then the documentary film series Youth Climate Report is for you.

But wait, the series has yet to be made. And it needs your help.

The series is about $2,500 short of its target. The series — produced in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme and Youth Climate Report, a new agency with roots in Toronto — presents the latest climate research as reported by youth from around the world to international policymakers at UN conferences.

The campaign is hosted by Catalyst, a crowdfunding initiative of the Centre for Social Innovation. Its goal is to raise $7,500 in a month and with two days to go, nearly $5,000 has been raised.

“I’m overwhelmed by the support our project has received,” YCR founder John Kelly said in a statement. “A total of 64 backers from around the world are supporting us, with more expected. We have received contributions ranging from $1 to $1000.”

The funds are being raised to establish a country starter kit for Ghana. The kit will provide training to local youth reporters so they can participate in a dialogue with researchers about the effects of climate change in their country. The starter kit will be a model for other countries to use in setting up their own productions.

The film series is the third in a successful partnership between UNEP and the producers of The Antarctica Challenge: A Global Warning (COP15, Copenhagen, 2009) and The Polar Explorer (COP16, Cancun, 2010).

When this series is done, it will premiere at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in November in Warsaw, Poland.

The campaign closes May 3 at 7 p.m. To contribute, go to: click here.

Raveena Aulakh is the Star's environment reporter. She is intrigued by climate change and its impact, now and long-term, and wildlife. Follow her on Twitter @raveenaaulakh