Halyna Vasylenko, part of the 2019 Rights Reframed cohort, is a Ukrainian activist. Her project is a multi-facted social campaign that blends online and offline actions to build public support for Crimean political prisoners, especially those imprisoned as a result of ethnic discrimination.
As part of this, she created a 30-second video for social media that centered around a fictionalized family sitting down to eat dinner together, drawing on the shared Ukrainian custom that no one begins eating until everyone is at the table. The video directs people to a site where they can send postcards with messages of support to political prisoners. The postcards are branded with the message “We are waiting for you at home.” The project aims to raise awareness among Ukrainians about the imprisonment of Crimean Tatars and other pro-Ukrainian activists, while also letting political prisoners that they have support. This is her first experience creating a video.
