2015 festival award winner helps refugee teenagers make films using their mobile phones
Faisal Attrache, Director of Growing Home, which won UNA Westminster’s We The Peoples Film Festival award for a film on Human Security last year, has now taken the project further in association with Save the Children.
The original film featured the daily life of a Syrian barber struggling to maintain normality in the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan. The new project features instruction of the camp’s refugee teenagers on how to make documentary films using their mobile phones. Faisal’s three week workshop culminated in the creation of nine short films shot entirely by the Za’atari teenagers. Students from McNally Smith College of Music in Minnesota have now composed original music for each film resulting in 44 minute compilation film depicting life in the Za’atari camp through the teenagers’ own eyes. The film “My Dream, My Right" will soon be available and some of the films can be viewed here.
The 2016 We The Peoples Film Festival will be held in November and currently, the First Stage judging team is assessing the 2500+ films already submitted. These will be shortlisted to about 200 from which about forty will be screened in the festival.
