“This is an important story, I like it. What visuals are you going to use in your film?” Salar, 19, has joined our pitching panel to advise the creative media students at New City College, Poplar. The Rio Ferdinand Foundation delivered a 4 week Media 4 Action training there, supporting students to tackle the community issues that matter to them, in this case, the racism faced by newly arrived immigrants.

Salar came to the U.K. from Afghanistan as a young refugee in 2016. He explains he knew nothing about the culture here and that everything looked different, leading him to feel very isolated. “During this time the main issue I had was not having opportunities to explore myself. I aspire to become a successful cinematographer in the future”.

As part of our BSBT programme this year, we collaborated on a training with Discovery Channel Inc. where we first invited Salar via his college. He brought his film-making talent and skills to one of the young teams. The result ‘Riftplane’ was written and made under two hours and Salar excelled as ‘director of photography’. Since then, the Foundation has invited Salar to film events outside the programme and take part in our training as a young media volunteer.

“The Rio Ferdinand Foundation gave me film-making opportunities. It also arranged a meeting with Rio Ferdinand to see him face to face, and I got to experience a press conference and interview him. This was one of my hopes”.

With the foundation’s support, Salar was responsible for filming an interview with Rio Ferdinand, which was key to our South London 4 South London (SL4SL) campaign looking at tilting negative stereotypes about young people in the area. The rest of the crew -interviewer, sound, photography- were young RFF volunteers from Southwark and Lewisham.

Based in Tower Hamlets, Salar was able to connect with a team of like-minded young people from all over London. As they networked with Rio’s production assistant, they discussed all joining forces to start up their own production company, working with Salar as their cinematographer. The foundation has offered to closely support the process to enable the young volunteers to become positive role models in their communities, showing initiative and entrepreneurship.

Salar has become visibly more confident, and developed his leadership skills as he accepts and leads on every opportunity we offer him, even if it means a four hour journey on public transport. When Discovery Channel Inc. contacted us to recommend young people for a Production Assistant role, we couldn’t think of anyone better. Salar decided not to interview for the job because he wants to finish his education first. But this is good news for the foundation. He is currently video editing interview clips for our social media and we hope to offer him paid work soon.

As Salar himself puts it, thanks to his college and opportunities at the foundation, “my life has become different and now I have hope for the future”.