Charles Mercier, Director of The Death of Tyson, shared this personal statement regarding the making of the film:

I spent the summer of 1999 in Lusaka, Zambia at a shelter for street kids, talking, teaching, getting to know the kids, and recording many hours of digital video. Of all African countries Zambia has been among the hardest hit by AIDS. Social structures for absorbing and caring for orphans have been overwhelmed by the enormity of the crisis and many thousands of these street kids, orphaned by AIDS, live in the median strips and vacant lots of a large city.

My interviews are a unique document of the children. In their own words, some in English, some in their local languages, they tell of their experiences of the age of AIDS in Zambia: what it was like to care for and bury their parents, what it is like to live in trees, to beg for money and defend it from violent thieves, to sniff fermented sewage as a drug to help them with a night's sleep on the noisy streets. A street kid Arion Phiri told me, “We are hungry, just hungry, it is not good what you are talking.” The 12 year old Chanda twins spend their days begging on the street and told me, “One of us can look for nsima and the other can look for relish and together we can make a complete meal.”

The events told in “The Death of Tyson” make us share a little of the lives of street kids and street educators in the time of AIDS in Zambia. On returning from a trip through Africa in May 2001, then Secretary of State Colin Powell was quoted in the NY Times as having said:

I knew a lot about this academically before I came. I'd read a great deal and I’d studied a great deal and I'd heard all the stories about there being a pandemic, a crisis, and how it was destroying families, how it was destroying cultures, but you really don't get a full appreciation of it until you see the people.

That’s the point of this documentary project: to see the people.