The white circle with the yellow bus is the logo of the Yellow Bus project.
Yellow Bus was founded by the Ukrainian film director Jaroslav Pilunskyj and other professionals from the media and education sector.
The goal is to build a meaningful system for young people for professional orientation in the field of culture and media.
The yellow bus exists since March 2016. Over 4000 students from more than 20 schools in seven Ukrainian cities participated in this project until now.
Among other things, 11 short films have been realized so far, eight journalistic reports have been produced, three issues of the children's newspaper Yellow Bus have been published and three summer camps have been organized.
I spoke to the founder and film director Jaroslav Pilunskyj in Kyiv.

»The society, which is in a state of war, is wounded.
We understand how the information provided by the aggressor affects the region around the front-line. We are documenting the various information that reach the front-line and from there the other parts of the population. We saw how public opinion was influenced.
As professional journalists, we have decided to do something. Working with grown-ups is difficult, they work like a kind of sect. Information affects adults similarly to a NLP program (Neuro Linguistic Program). That's why we decided to work with teenagers first.
It is specific that they are able refuse to all the prejudices and stereotypes conveyed to them by parents, the school and the media if they are presented with an an alternative.
We try to establish a methodology on our side that gives these young people the basic knowledge of the media. In 2016, we started working with children in the Kyiv region. We encouraged these children to provide humanitarian aid to the children on the front-line. Then we produced videos with them and took the videos and humanitarian aid to the cities on the front-line. There, we showed the videos and made clear what the children from Kyiv had achieved with dedication.
In regard of the children of the front-line, we have organized tutorials and workshops about the basics of media, cinema and journalism. We and the children learned how to do it in a proper way.
The Maidan 2013 was my key moment for the Babylon '13 project. There was a group of cinematographers, film directors and scriptwriters whose goal was to develop a cinema for the civil society. Babylon was founded in 2013 and at the same time Russia began publishing its own interpretation of the events. We wanted to show what the people of the Maidan really represented. When it came to disputes on the Maidan, we reported about it in blogs and streaming portals. We considered how to use our talents as effectively as possible, when the Crimea was annexed and the war started in the East.
Originally, I came from the Crimea and I went there after the annexation because I wanted to report about the situation. During the referendum, I was kidnapped from an election office. My kidnappers were students from Simferopol University. They beat me so badly that some of my ribs broke. They told me that they hated me because my camera is stronger than their weapons.
When I returned from Crimea, I wondered what might happen to the Crimeans. I am originally from Sevastopol and this city is extremely pro-Russian and I understood that processes took place deep down in the mind of the people there.
After my return from the Crimea, I studied history and psychology to better understand these processes and the mentality. I realized that the way of Crimea back to Ukraine would take a very long time. We came to the conclusion that we needed a large foundation for effective communication for the people who are affected by forced majeure. In this case, the forced majeure was the war.
To structure all organizations in a useful way, you have to build a proper network. People who are in a state of war need a complex solution. We have been working with such a platform for two years and it has become extremely difficult to establish this complex scene. We also realized that we need about 2 million dollars for such a venture. We applied to foundations and presented our plans to the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Welfare and the Ministry of Occupied Territories. But the whole state apparatus is still moving in the old ways.
After all, we came to a dead end with this idea and we decided to start a smaller model for young people only. This smaller model is the Yellow Bus.
We managed it first with our hands-on experience, but now we want to develop the project into a kind of distance learning. It should become a platform for young people and prepare them for their studies. We've developed a four-step model that trains young people in the media to become professionals.
In the first level the students should get acquainted with cinema, journalism and dramaturgy. By teaching the basic of dramaturgy we also show how media are able to manipulate. In the second level we suggest the students to professionalize themselves.
Our background idea is that we are all in the middle of a storm with information and if you do not want to drown, you have to learn to swim in it. So we teach them this swimming in the flow of information. The second level is a preparation for higher education. The third level is the study itself. And in the fourth level, we try to convince the graduated students to use their productions and content to train the younger ones in the first level.
We see our work as a kind of civil defense in an information war. And we hope that the content that we produce on our site is also seen by the children in the occupied territories. We have also produced three newspaper issues in the yellow bus project and we hope that they will be read in the occupied territories as well. Unfortunately, it is dangerous for people to bring this content to the occupied territories.
We teach children what journalism means. And especially, what honest journalism means. We tell them to report impartially and to rely on facts. The best children's articles are published in national newspapers and we continue to communicate with them after the publication.
We also talk to psychologists who are specialists in war traumas and they tell us that we are able do work with children in ways the psychologists are not able to. Because every conversation with psychologists is also a kind of microtrauma hence the children are reminded of the traumatizing events again. But we come from the other side, we talk to the children as if there were no war and try to encourage them to a creative process. So the kids can handle it.
For example, we had children from Krasnohorivka who spent their nights in the basement and came to our workshops during the day. They listened and worked with us just like all the other kids. The only difference between children from the combat zone and from peaceful areas is that the war children appear to be more grown-up. We play like in a big cinema, everyone has a role and we work as a team. And when negative feelings arise, we try to overcome them and stay together as a team.
I especially remember two stories from the yellow bus project. One is about a family in Krasnohorivka. The two daughters of the family took part in our workshop from the beginning and also visited our summer camp in Odessa. The older one has started studying media at the university and the younger one has made a film that received many awards at the summer camp. Also the girl's mother is now active in the media area in Krasnohorivka, she has published articles and many people know her.
Another story is from Novoajdar. It is about a girl who lives on the front-line side which is controlled by Ukraine and has to visit the school in the occupied territories every day and pass the checkpoints. Her article has also been published.
We want to give the children a perspective with our project and we try to stay in contact with those children on the front-line for as long as possible and to develop the conditions for our work further. And we would like to extend this work to the whole of Ukraine and not just limit it to the war zone. The next step will be to set up a platform to make contacts over long distances.«

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