Education Above All demands justice without compromise

To many, watching a child in pain evokes an immediate, gut-churning response. Dreamers in Doorways refuses to look away from the marginalized children living in war-torn countries, many of whom are often targeted in their schools. 

Education Above All gives us a stark look at the lives of children who seek education but are unable to receive it due to conflict in their country. Voiced over by Athar, a young woman living in Gaza, the camera journeys to Uganda, Haiti, and Iraq to visit bombed-out schools and children working in fields instead of learning. The kids speak to us, telling their story. By focusing almost entirely on children, the innocence and victimhood of these young people. There are no views of guns or the military, reminding us that this is not a political statement but a basic human right that is being denied. 

The entire film features affected youth, but one of the final scenes comprises of footage of Yemenese schoolchildren as they are being rescued from a school that has been attacked. It only lasts for ten seconds, but the image of the young boy, no older than five, covered in blood from a head wound, is traumatic and effective. The sound at this point was mixed by Jim Griffin, who says he “[used] children crying and screaming to underpin the action. I then heavily filtered the whole scene to recreate the feeling of bombed-out tinnitus and used two different high-pitched frequencies hard-panned to make it as uncomfortable as possible on the ear.”

Paddy Dowling, traditionally a portrait photographer, shot the film, creating an ethereal vision of the children as he captures them walking to work, standing amidst broken concrete and in front of blank chalkboards, swinging from twisted rebar. It’s subtly beautiful and heartbreaking, and the sentimentality of the ad is not the usual saccharine affectations, but the dark and honest truth of a child’s life gone horribly wrong.