imba! The Story of the African Children's Choir
Erin Levin
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Issue
Youth and Education
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Mission
To transform the audience's view of Africa's children and inspire them to believe in hope.
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Website
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CVF Involvement
Creative Visions Foundation (CVF) provides imba! The Story of the African Children's Choir with all community membership benefits and fiscal agency.
Imba means sing will bring together the playfulness and bittersweet beauty of childhood in a cinematic adventure through North America via the lens of Moses and Angel, two children from the African Children's Choir on a journey that will change the course of their lives forever.
Moses and Angel's experience is documented as they perform in venues across the country, acting as the ambassadors for Africa's most vulnerable children. Their goal, to raise awareness and show that despite the desolate circumstances they come from, they have beauty, dignity, hope and unlimited potential.
We will come alongside their journey and invite the viewer to experience Moses and Angel's poverty, poignancy, compelling performances, hope and humor.
The story will be told by the children and their chaperones (former Choir members themselves). Much like the Choir, imba means sing is not about how Westerners help Africa; instead, it is about the gift of music and joy that these African children give us.
The film is set in many places, as it is the story of a journey. We begin in the hot, dusty, bustling city of Kampala, Uganda and while there spend time in the slums, the city and also a rural Ugandan village.
The film also follows the Choir to America on airplanes and spends the kids' first week in America with them at a camp outside of Chicago. We visit the children in suburban Milwaukee on Lake Michigan and travel with them from snowy Canada down to New York City for their star-studded gala.
We plan to meet back up with the Choir at the Grand Canyon and experience the Wild West with these imaginative kids. Then we will find them at a very American mega-church in the Colorado Rockies. We will also spend time with the Choir in the crew's hometown of Atlanta where we capture a concert where the camera is the audience and film the kids singing the National Anthem at a Braves Game.
Finally, we will meet the children at a camp in Raleigh as they prepare for the huge transition back home and fly with the kids back to Uganda. There we will also meet up with successful former Choir members to capture their stories on camera.











