War, lives & Videotape

“Video Diaries” give small but sophisticated cameras to “ordinary” people so they themselves can uniquely, and at times disturbingly, capture the unfolding events of their often extraordinary lives. In Nick Danzinger’s Video Diary, he visits two institutions in Kabul, Afghanistan. One is an eighteen century style mental asylum where orphaned children are dumped and socialized into insanity. The other is a Red Cross hospital for war injuries where some children have lost their families in the rubble of a rocket attack on their homes. He resolves to build and find finance for a safe house for these children. Working on his own with a small camera for five months he ceases to be an observer to become and active participant in the events around him. The relocation of the orphans forms only a part of his portrayal of the resourceful inhabitants of a devastated city within a Hiroshima landscape. His Video Diary is an affectionate and often harrowing story of the lives (and deaths) of forgotten people in a forgotten war.