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S P E E C H E S

So – you want to grab the wheel and help save the planet – but songs are not your thing, and a fully-worked out story is a bit beyond you at the moment.  No Worries!  Start with a speech – or a poem. Or a Rap, or a piece of stand up comedy.  Think of an appeal – or an accusation. Check out these two speeches from the first Peace Child show – which kind of defined it: give us some context – and then give us a speech like this:  

Peace Child to the presidents, sadly, after they have reached deadlock in the weapons negotiations:

Katya              Look. Keep your bombs!  They’re not the problem. The problem is whatever it is in your heads that makes you feel you need them!  We ask you to love each other, to care for each other like Bobby and me.  We’re friends! – and we’d like for you to be friends too, then you wouldn’t have to waste all this money preparing to blow each other up!  You could just put all your bombs in a cupboard somewhere and forget about them….

*                      OR                  *

In the TV Chat show studio, Bobby and Katya sit uncomfortably on studio chairs facing the Chat Show host:

Katya              I don’t want to die in a nuclear war….

Host                Nuclear war?

Bobby             Yes! (his blood is up now. He gets up and walks towards the camera – his face huge on the screen behind him) I want to tell people about the danger!  Our leaders have gone crazy! They’ve built enough bombs to destroy our world and what’s worse?! – they seem to be planning to use them. I don’t want to die!  There are billions and billions of people on our planet, and they don’t want to die either!  But just because a handful of leaders want to have these bombs, it looks as though we’re going to have to. All of us – and everything living thing in our world with us!  So I want all the billions and billions of people on our planet who want to live to rise up! – and tell those leaders: “NO!!” We don’t want your bombs.  We want you to get rid of the ones you’ve already made. And STOP building any more!!  That’s what I came here to say….  (he returns to his chair. The audience applaud.)

That’s Peace Child.  But, to get inspired, look at some of the great movie speeches of all time: Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator; Jeff Daniels in Newsroom, Al Pacino’s Speech in A Scent of a Woman; Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men;

 

And the world is full of great speeches by young people. Listen to some of them:

Saeeda Azorio
Greta Thunberg

Severin Suzuki
Alec Loorz
Malala Yousafsai

Education went from being a right to being a crime.  Girls were stopped from going to school.  I had two options. One was to remain silent and wait to be killed. And the second was to speak up and then be killed. I chose the second one. I decided to speak up.  We could not just stand by and see those injustices of the terrorists denying our rights, ruthlessly killing people and misusing the name of Islam. We decided to raise our voice and tell them: Have you not learnt, have you not learnt that in the Holy Quran Allah says: if you kill one person it is as if you kill the whole of humanity?  Do you not know that Mohammad, peace be upon him, the prophet of mercy, says, “do not harm yourself or others”. And do you not know that the very first word of the Holy Quran is the word “Iqra”, which means “read”?”

Donovan Livingstone

By using this link to submit your song, you confirm you agree to our  Terms and Conditions outlined in the  Small Print (below)

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Small  Print

All songs, statements and stories are subject to the following, legally binding understanding.

  • All songs and statements must be the original work of a young person aged 8 to 20 years old;
  • Stories may be written and read by people of any age, and songs may be arranged, played and recorded by musicians, singers, engineers and videographers of any age.
  • Each song and statement must be between 2 & 5-minutes long;
  • Each song and statement must be supplied in text form in both the original language and English;
  • Each song must be recorded in MP4; .MOV; WMV; FLV; AVI; AVCHD; WebM;  MKV format;
  • Each song, statement and story remains the sole property of the young person who wrote it (“The Author”) and those to whom s/he gave a share of their rights for assistance with recording and/or arrangement;
  • Peace Child International (“The Producer”) reserves the right to broadcast the song in the context of the UN Day Festival itself, and promotion thereof, and for any non-commercial, educational purpose there-after;
  • The Producer encourages the Author to create and promote commercial, income-generating audio and visual recordings of their work and will make any material produced for the UN Day Festival freely available to the Author to assist them in that effort.
  • The Producer reserves the right to re-record any song, statement or story for the UN Day Festival if, in their opinion, the recording made by the Author does not do justice to the quality of the composition and lyric;
  • Submissions Format: Contributions can be in any language but must come with an English translation. All spoken word must be in video format; songs can be submitted as video or audio files, or as scores to be recorded by other artists – or by one of the Peace Child International house bands;

 

Responsibilities: 

  • All partners must promote the Peace Child International Songs for Survival opportunity to their networks of young people and organisations, and support them to participate in whatever way they are able;
  • All partners must promote the Festival Programme in whatever media they have access to;
  • All partners must alert those in positions of power – in government and other sectors of society – to the Festival Programme and develop ways to support them first to watch it, and then to take action to partner with the youth on the delivery of the priority challenges and targets identified;

Privileges: 

  • All partners may create their own versions of the Festival Programme to be distributed for non-commercial / educational use in territories where they operate;
  • All partners may put forward 4 x judges (2 over 40 / 2 under 40; 2 male / 2 female) to vote which songs are included in the international broadcast;
  • All partners will be listed with their logos and links to their websites on the Songs for Survival homepage which is designed to become the go-to site for students and teachers seeking up-to-the-minute data on the movement of key human, and planetary, survival indicators;

Schedule:

  • May 1 2021:                   Launch Event – Website open for Entries;
  • September 21 2021:        Deadline for Registration & Receipt of Completed Entries;
  • October 24 2021:            UN Day Festival – 30-minute 1st Year Proof of Concept Broadcast based on the   

 outline script which can be read here; also, we hope, that a pilot national version of the Festival will be broadcast in at least one country in 2021 – with many more nationally hosted versions to follow in subsequent years;