When people are given the chance to turn their lives into creative stories rather than factual accounts, they are more free to explore key issues.

Film-making and crafting are used together or separately as complementary forms of community engagement and artistic expression. Collaborative filmmaking combines image-making and community practice where internet-ready media representations merge with ideas of social justice to offer an tool of value to marginalised communities and filmmakers. In this way it is not just the final films as outputs that count, but the process of making the films or the handcrafted objects. It is the process, the gathering together, that allows people to  discuss matters of concern in a way that not only reinforces a sense of community cohesion, but also provides the facilitative space and activity that allows participants to problem solve, formulate more effective decision-making tools and build new collaborative initiatives.

Our workshops provide training in

1.  All aspects of filmmaking (acting, camera, editing and direction)
2.  Publishing the films online and organising screenings for local communities

Our methods involve making films that are not directly issue-driven from the outset but create a space and opportunity for key themes facing a community to be discovered and explored, thereby facilitating participants to find solutions to challenges.

Outputs: Using the same footage our films can be edited for different purposes and target audiences (local, international) and for different screens (cinema, mobile phone).

Note: We build in activities into our workshops and reflexive assessment into our production to rigorously challenge stereotypes often found in mainstream media representations of marginal communities.

One of the main challenges for many projects is to guarantee equal demographic representation in terms of age, gender, professional background and tribes’ territorial coverage. Gender sensitivity is of particular importance and our team relies heavily on experience from over twenty-five years of engagement and fieldwork across the region.