(sitar music)
(hammer hitting metal)
- Hit it harder!
Yeah, harder!
(loud crash)
- Whoa!
(suspenseful orchestral music)
- I'm Michael Frith.
I'm one of the founding partners of No Strings
and an executive producer on the films
that we make for kids at risk all around the world.
- I'm Kathy Mullen.
I used to be a puppeteer.
- [Puppet] You got that right.
- And now, I am a writer, director, producer,
and artistic director for No Strings Productions.
No Strings really came about as an answer,
our answer to 9/11, because when 9/11 happened
and Afghanistan started being bombed by our planes,
(bomb exploding)
we were thinking, "Oh my god, this is just horrible."
- We kind of looked at each other and went,
"Well, we know how to do this.
"It feels like what we're doing should have,
"could have some kind of relevance here."
- So we got a bunch of puppet people together and talked.
We had a conference.
"What can we do?"
- We really formed a kind of a clan
within the whole puppet world of these people
who knew how to do this better than
anybody else on the planet.
- So about a week later I get a call from England.
- A guy named Johnny McGlade who is an aid worker,
and he's just come back from Afghanistan.
- And he has a puppet.
He wanted to do a puppet show to help children
in Afghanistan stay safe from land mines.
- When we heard this, we kind of went, "Oh yeah, I see.
"That's what we can be doing."
(light orchestral music)
- So the kinds of things that No Strings addresses
are things that kids at risk all over the world confront.
It could be AIDS.
It could be stigma from AIDS.
- Whoa, whoa, whoa, stay away from that boy.
His parents died of AIDS.
And don't touch that bowl.
It's contaminated. (gasps)
- It could be natural disasters, hurricanes.
- Floods and landslides and volcanoes.
- Uh-oh. (volcano exploding)
Somebody needs to wake up.
And fast!
- Sanitation and malnutrition.
- I'm taking Susie away from the house.
I don't want her defecating around here.
- Oh, okay.
(grunts) (breathing hard)
(gong rings)
- Hey, don't you know you're contaminating that water?
This is drinking water for everyone.
(light orchestral music)
- A lot of kids don't know the simple need
to wash your hands and why.
- No, he did not wash his hands, and neither did I!
So what?
- Really, what you're talking about is educating
the populace in a different way of behavior.
Our first thought was to do a live show,
and we were well into developing this
when we got a call from Johnny saying,
"They're shooting people.
"If you were to get up there
"and hold up a puppet, you'd be a target."
- That didn't happen.
That was just not practical at all.
- Gosh, what is it we really know better than anything?
It's television puppetry.
- So we went for the video.
(silly music)
- Don't worry, I'll be careful,
and I won't step on anything.
- Danger! (alarm ringing)
Land mines!
Stay out! (siren blaring)
Stay out!
(crashing) (kids screaming)
Land mines!
- What happened?
Look where your other leg should be.
(light orchestral music)
- We went over to Cobble to do
the dubbing into Pashto and Dari.
- (speaking foreign language)
- The reception there was amazing.
The kids responded immediately and so positively
to the lessons in the show.
(sitar music)
- (speaking foreign language)
(bomb exploding)
(light orchestral music)
- It's been playing there for over 12 years now.
They still use this video.
There are still land mines in Afghanistan.
Johnny was there, and he met a guy, an Afghan guy.
They were talking and Johnny said,
"Yeah, we did a program for Afghanistan 10 years ago.
"It was called ChucheQhalin."
And the guy said, "Chuchi?
"You did Chuchi?
"I grew up on Chuchi!
"I love Chuchi!"
So this was really cool.
I loved hearing that, that he learned
about land mines from Chuchi, from this character.
This boy was in it.
- Whoa! - No, Chuchi, no, Chuchi!
- Huh? Jawdul?
- [Kids] Stop!
- No, Chuchi, look at the overgrown path,
the burned out truck, and the cow skeleton!
No one goes to that house, Chuchi.
There must be land mines in there.
(upbeat music)
- It really gave us inspiration for going on to No Strings,
which we have now done 15 or so different short films
that have been translated into scores
of different languages and dialects around the world.
- It's a very broad mandate in terms of subject matter
because it could be anything.
We did mosquito-borne diseases.
(dramatic orchestral music)
- Let's see what Madame Mosquito is up to.
- Pay attention, my little offspring.
You will soon be grown and ready to bite.
(mosquitoes laughing)
Silence!
- This net will protect the people sleeping under it
from getting bitten by a mosquito carrying malaria.
(dog barking)
(upbeat music)
- Nutrition was a biggie.
They eat rice and nothing else in Madagascar, for instance.
We need them to know, no, vegetables are important (laughs).
(accordion music) ♪ Bananas yellow ♪
♪ The beans so green ♪
♪ Tomatoes red ♪
♪ All the colors I've seen ♪
♪ Plant them in the garden ♪
♪ My mama used to say ♪
♪ Got to eat a rainbow every day ♪
(upbeat music) - Our first challenge
is finding out as much as we can about the problem,
really immersing ourselves in it.
And the second part of it is immersing ourselves
in the culture of whatever part of the world
it is that we're targeting.
- So I concentrate on the scripting,
which with No Strings requires a lot of research.
I'll research the culture,
I'll research the mythology of the culture,
and then I'll start generating treatments for ideas.
And that goes back to the NGO people in the field.
Sometimes they have psychologists.
Sometimes they have educators.
They have all kinds of people on their staff.
They will vet this and send me ideas and,
"You can do this and you can't do that."
- You really not only are trying to deal with the problem,
but you're dealing with the ways
that that problem has been tackled in the past
without, and this is really critical,
pointing a finger, without blaming,
because people do what they do, very often,
out of a real need to do it that way.
There hasn't been another option,
another opportunity that's been presented.
So we have to look at it and say,
"Okay, within the context of the culture
"that we're talking to, what can we say,
"what can we do that will open up
"the possibility of new ways of thinking
"and will also give very solid life lessons
"in how to deal with these critical problems?"
- They get the script.
They make the comments.
I get it back.
It goes back and forth
till everybody's happy with the script.
Then we know what we're shooting, and we start building.
So once we're ready for production,
we hire in all the freelancers we need,
including puppeteers, and we get
the very best puppeteers we possibly can.
But as far as the production itself goes,
it's every bit as high production value
as any Muppet thing I've ever done.
We've been working with the same people for 12 years.
Most of the time everybody can come back.
Most of the time they say yes.
We take the video into the field,
and a lot of the NGOs who are working in that field,
they'll send representatives
from their groups to a workshop.
And in the workshop, those representatives
will learn the material in the video,
how to use it, some basic puppetry skills
that they can use with the kids in the field.
And then they take this video out to their groups
where they need to teach,
and they basically reproduce that workshop for the kids.
And they allow the kids to use puppetry
to create their own stories of what's happened to them,
and it can be very cathartic
and certainly instructive to everybody watching.
- Young people like fun.
And with the use of the puppets, it is all fun.
(upbeat music)
- I think one of my favorite little stories was,
we did a series of films for Madagascar.
And they went to our team, and they drove off into an area
where they set up to show the films
and realized that in this place,
the people who lived there had never seen a moving picture.
And I've always wished I could have been there
to have seen the expressions on the faces of the people
who saw this phenomenon for the first time,
in this case, the person of a singing lemur
telling them how important it was to use a latrine.
(accordion music) ♪ Let's all use a latrine ♪
♪ Always use the latrine ♪
♪ Not the bushes please ♪
♪ That's how we keep it clean ♪
(sentimental orchestral music)
- We will continue to do the kinds of things
we've been doing all along.
In the meantime, we also want to do
something for the United States.
- You know, you look at the developing world.
We've got a lot of it right here at our own doorstep.
And you don't have to go to the other side of this planet
to find these problems.
They're right here.
Children probably three blocks
from where we're sitting right now
are traumatized by gunfire in their neighborhoods,
by terrible things that are happening in their schools.
The school lockdowns themselves are traumatizing.
- We're talking about doing something
on what they call SEL, social-emotional learning.
It talks about learning critical thinking,
empathy, self-control, how to calm yourself,
all those things that you think we would
learn normally in our day to day, but kids don't.
- It's very gratifying to see how wonderfully
these films have been accepted wherever they've gone.
The thing that's problematic and difficult
is that it's a menu that has no end.
Anywhere you go, everywhere in the world,
there are terrible problems that need to be addressed.
And what our hope is, is that we can
uniquely through this medium demonstrate to kids
that there is hope.
Unfortunately, you can't solve everything,
but if you can change but one life,
you change the world entire.
And we're hoping that we can change some lives
and by doing that, change the world.
(upbeat music)
(scatting)