The high school audience wasn't all that much younger than Rory Kennedy -- youngest child of the late Robert F. Kennedy -- was when she started her career making documentaries.

Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Filmmaker Rory Kennedy watches a clip of her documentary "Pandemic: Facing AIDS" during a presentation to high school students yesterday at the Carnegie Science Center. Click photo for larger image.

Upon graduating with a degree in women's studies from Brown University in 1991, Kennedy began making documentaries -- first about women addicts in prison -- because she saw it as a way to change people's minds about social issues.

"Trust me when I say that these films do have impact,'' Kennedy told about 175 high school students from more than a dozen schools at the Carnegie Science Center yesterday.

High school students in the Pittsburgh region will have their own chance to make science documentaries about the region's environment as part of a new competition. The films will be featured at a high school film festival at the SciTech Spectacular in the fall.

The competition is a partnership of Bayer Corp., SciTech Spectacular and Pittsburgh Filmmakers. Students will have a chance to participate in a free summer workshop at Pittsburgh Filmmakers and use its editing equipment.

Kennedy was brought in to help provide the inspiration.

Kennedy's most recent documentary -- "Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable'' -- deals with the environmental issue of a potential nuclear release, but the documentary she highlighted yesterday focused on the global AIDS crisis. The documentary, which has been assembled in short versions, long versions and as a series, has been seen by millions of people on HBO as "Pandemic: Facing AIDS.''

The room was silent as Kennedy showed a segment on African children, who were orphaned as a result of AIDS, singing, as translated in English subtitles, "What are we going to do? Where are we going to go? Where shall we hide from AIDS?''

There was more silence as she showed a woman in Thailand who was dying of AIDS make a long journey to see her parents and child one last time for an emotional reunion filled with both love and rejection.

Kennedy had no experience when she began making documentaries.

"My interest was in social issues. The way to influence policy was through filmmaking,'' she said.

She initially teamed up with Robin Smith, who had been a CBS producer, to do the story on women in prison, a documentary that received foundation funding.

Kennedy likes to focus on personal stories, like one of a pregnant woman who was jailed after she couldn't get treatment for her drug addiction because she was pregnant.

Kennedy said she thought "if these women could tell their own stories, and people could hear what I was hearing, that would make a difference.''

Kennedy produces and directs the documentaries. In 1998, Kennedy and Liz Garbus co-founded Moxie Firecracker Films.

Her work has appeared on HBO, Lifetime Television, A&E, Court TV, The Oxygen Network and The Learning Channel. Her work has won awards for best documentary, including one from the American Film Institute.

Her work to fight AIDS began when she was part of a White House delegation to Uganda in the late 1990s, where she met a woman named Bernadette who had lost 12 of her 13 children to AIDS and was the sole caretaker of 35 grandchildren, many of whom were HIV positive. She learned Bernadette's situation was not unusual -- whole families and communities have been decimated.

Kennedy said the number of people with AIDS worldwide is expected to climb to 100 million by 2010, but Uganda is among those dramatically reducing the rate of transmission. Kennedy continues to be committed to making people aware of the issue and said that it takes resources and government will to fight AIDS.

Kennedy thinks the students have a "terrific'' opportunity to make documentaries.

"I think they can do great things,'' she said.

The competition is called the SciTech Spectacular CAUSE (Creating Awareness and Understanding of Our Surrounding Environment) Challenge by Bayer Corp.

More information on the competition is available on the Web at www.scitechspec.org.