Jelena & Amina’s Story 

We were commissioned by Ecumenical Women's Initiative to create two animated stories about positive and significant changes their grants helped achieve. The first is about peace and reconciliation -Jelena, a Bosnian Serb woman living in Visegrad - hears the side of bosniaks about the war. The second one about Amina, an inmate at Tuzla Women's prison, who participates in a workshop of non violent communication. Both stories are in Bosnia & Herzegovina, where scars of war are still present.

From the definition of the colours, to the design, to the voices and music, we’ve done a lot of reseach and got feedback from locals to stay true to the story and context.

Both animations are based in real statements written by Jelena and Amina in Bosnian and modified slightly to adapt to the animation format.

While we had to translate the stories to English for the international viewers and inevitably some words lost its effectiveness in the translation, some sentences were left unchanged in the Bosnian version, so they are an even truer representation of the stories.

Below are early ideas from the storyboard of Jelena’s Story. We wanted to explore how we perceive someone that is different than us - “the others”: A misterious form, that reveals itself when we get to know them.

In Amina’s story, non violent communication is a really powerful tool to build social skills needed for community reintegration in prisons.

In the statement written by Amina we hear her say beautifully how she was proud to express her emotions with words, and how important is communication to build relatioships.

Colourful shapes were used to represent words - and the same shapes rearranged in different orders can change completely the meaning.