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LBU graduate launches film to stop young people from falling into knife crime
Vilson Duarte-Dong, who graduated from the university in 2023, has co-created Cut Short, a new documentary about the tragic consequences of carrying knives.
The documentary, which has been produced by Tell Studio, has been created alongside prominent anti-knife campaigner Sarah Lloyd and is intended to be shown in local schools and colleges across the North of England.
Vilson said: “This is a social problem and will take a long time to change, but I’m trying to plant seeds of doubt everywhere to try and make things better.
“As a community, we’ve all got to do our bit and push things forward together, and hopefully that will lead to a decrease [in knife crime].”
Vilson, who was born in Portugal and came to the UK at the of 12, faced the threat of deportation while in prison, which provided the wake-up call he needed to change his life.
He joined the university’s BSc Hospitality Business Management course shortly after his release in 2020, developing a long-held passion for the sector, and now speaks in local schools about his experiences.
Although adapting from prison to full-time education had its understandable challenges, Vilson stuck with the course with the support of his lecturers and views graduation as an example of what can be achieved through application and determination.
“It was tough getting used to life at Leeds Beckett, I was with people who weren’t from the same walk of life and it was hard to relate to them. I went from being around people all the time, to being on my own a lot, working and studying full-time, and it was difficult to adapt.
“My lecturers supported me through the whole thing – there were times when I had to get extensions after I had a bad accident in my second year – and were really understanding with me.”
After graduating, Vilson is now working as a floor manager at award-winning Leeds restaurant Tattu and has ambitions to launch his own hospitality organisation to rehabilitate ex-offenders and other people who want to turn their lives around.
“My dream is to eventually build enough experience and credibility on both sides of my life and create an entity which acts as a vehicle for good and to change people’s mentalities.
“It is a mentality and a mental health problem for a lot of people. I want to be able to mentor and help people grow so that they can get to a point where they’re doing something they adore as well.”
View the trailer and find out more about Cut Short.