Team Bertho: What can you learn from your life failures?
How a pet project of three high schoolers evolved into an internationally recognised storytelling platform
Murshid was a young boy when he was deeply affected by the increasing number of suicides around him. It compelled him to do something to raise awareness about suicide prevention.
With the little pocket money he had, some production knowledge acquired from his uncle, and his own camera, he made a film titled 'Atmahatya' at the age of 16 along with two other friends.
They bagged the second prize at the 11th ISTARC Science and Technology Festival-2018, a national inter-school competition. Subsequently, the film's success inspired him to make more films to create social awareness. And so 'Team Bertho' was born, a storytelling platform, along with Faiaz and Semonty in 2016.
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"Bertho means 'unsuccessful' or 'vain' in Bangla. It is the stories of failed ventures that carve the pathway to success because failures teach us the valuable lessons that we end up using the most in our lives," explained Murshid Alam Bhuiyan, director of the platform.
What started as a pet project of three friends in high school is now a global platform consisting of 13 core members. Along with Murshid, the three other chief executives in the team are Md Redwanul Islam Risad, Quazi Sakhawat Hossain Faiaz and Fahmina Faiz Semonty.
"We work on documenting the lessons and values people learn in different stages of their lives and then put them forward as innovative, creative, and effective solutions for everyone to live their best life," said Murshid.
Although the journey started with filmmaking, their creative endeavours branched out to published books, podcasts, seminars and much more.
The storytelling branches of Team Bertho
In 2020, Team Bertho published a book called "Fueling Hope," to create a counter to the sense of loss people had gone through in the earlier phases of Covid-19.
"These stories of different individuals demonstrate how to preserve hope in times of despair and cherish the good memories in life," added Murshid.
There is an old Japanese proverb, Ichi-go Ichi-e, which describes a cultural concept of treasuring the unrepeatable nature of a moment.
In a collaboration with The Youth Exchange South to South aka YESS Girls Movement, the team had launched their Facebook live series based on this Japanese notion. They believe this series of conversations is unique as no one story (or similar stories) is shared twice.
These seminars were designed with mental health professionals and researchers on mental health and well-being. As for the first episode, a hypnotherapist from UAE, Sabah Elahi conducted the session, for the second episode of the series, Canadian yoga instructor, Niya Bajaj shared her insights.
These days podcasts and audiobooks are gaining popularity amongst the youth. Keeping that in mind, Team Bertho launched 'Berthodoler Caravan,' a podcast where people of all ages and professions around the world talk about their mission and vision in life.
The episodes are as short as two to three minutes. There is an animation visual with the audio narration of episodes in each season.
How is Team Bertho different from the Humans of New York?
While the Humans of New York photoblog uses portrait photography and creative writing to highlight people's stories, Team Bertho uses a myriad of art forms like creative writing, painting and illustration, graphic design, short filmography, photography, etc. to make content that is appealing to their audience.
Both platforms are similar in terms of their core objective: tell people's stories to the world; and in doing so, inspire and provoke emotions in others. However, Team Bertho does not prescribe to the same vision as HONY per se.
"In Team Bertho, we focus on the 'morals' and then the story behind those morals," said Murshid. The team categorises the stories into three sections: cultural, experience-based and scientific; and then aim to keep their process of knowledge sharing by using different creative forms.
65 countries, 350,000 people (so far)
Initially, they tried to network and connect with people in Bangladesh only. Then, through their work, they gradually could reach out and connect to people around the world. This is where social media-fueled their project and aided them to reach an international spectrum of audience and storytellers real quick.
One of the team's core values is to reach people from every part of the world.
Murshid remarked, "At first the regular followers and contributors of our work were mostly in the age group of 16-25 years. But now we have found to be reaching and connecting with individuals in their middle ages as well as in their senescence."
While they documented the story of a 15-year-old Ruby Lockey-Pope from England sharing her realisation about being privileged and her resilience for wanting to help others, they also documented the story of 41-year-old Jamie Wilson sharing how she overcame the physical and sexual abuse she encountered as a child and how she continues to help others finding hope after encountering trauma.
Team Bertho has already connected people from 65 countries across every continent of the world. Their allies from countries like Germany, Vietnam, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India, Bhutan, Japan, Nepal, USA, Kenya, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Peru, Venezuela and more have shared their stories and assisted in creating a global hub for the team.
The life lessons documented by Team Bertho have reached more than 350,000 people worldwide so far.
The beginning: A young Murshid
From a very young age, Murshid wanted to do something for the people around him.
He joined Cub Scout from his school Faizur Rahman Ideal Institute in the third grade. "My scout coach Md Helal Uddin taught me about the importance of integrity and empathy in life. I was deeply inspired by him," Murshid recalled.
Since then he has harvested a vision to create a more inclusive society. Eventually, he started working on documenting the words of wisdom sieved through the lens of individual perspectives.
To channel his passion, he started extracting knowledge from the life lessons of individuals; and to create a positive impact on the young minds he started to design those into modules and workshops.
For Murshid's sincere role in boy scouts, he was awarded the 'Shapla Cub Award,' the highest award of Cub Scouting in 2013 and the 'President's Scout Award' in 2016.
Earlier in 2021, he received the Diana Award, the highest accolade for a young person to achieve for social actions and humanitarian efforts.
Team Bertho's milestones
After bagging several prizes in inter-school and national competitions initially, they started to gain significant international recognition through their films. And they funded their subsequent films and projects with the prize money they had already won.
For their short film 'Jibon', which focuses on the importance of clean water for a healthy life, the team won the Meena Media Award 2019.
They won second prize at the BLAST Short Film Competition 2019 for the film 'Sangya.' It is about the magnitude and negative social impact of rape in our society.
At the Discovery Film Festival, the film 'Responsibility' won the Best Foreign Language Film.'Simpering' won the UNICEF Certificate of Merit for Rights Education (Corti a Ponte 2020) in 2020. It portrays how every smile in every part of our society is beautiful in its own way.
Fahmina Faiz Semonty, the resource head of Team Bertho concluded, "Trying to initiate and prolong such a diverse platform from Bangladesh might be tough, but it is worth the effort. With the power of global networking via the internet, it has become easier."
The team plans to go further, connecting people hailing from every corner of the world and creating a global community via the power of personal stories and collective wisdom.
