Film for Social Change
Film and filmmaking offer powerful tools to achieve social change. Camfed's filmmaking enables grassroots filmmakers to tell their own stories in their own setting. The marketing and distribution strategies enable communities across Africa, and audiences internationally, to see the films, engage in dialog, and act for change.
Camfed participatory film projects are operational in Ghana and Zambia:
- The Learning Circle project in Ghana has trained 23 girls and women living in poor rural communities of the Northern Region, including those with disabilities, in camera techniques, storytelling, audio and post-production. The group has to date produced six films covering issues including exclusion from education, attitudes towards disability and the practice of fostering. Watch some of the Learning Circle’s films.
- The Samfya Women Filmmakers in Zambia is a group of girls and young women who share a background of rural poverty. Their first film, Nsanga Inshila (I’ve Found My Way), recounts the real-life experiences of Penelop, an 18-year-old orphan, and her struggle to provide for herself in the wake of her parents’ death. Three members of the group showed their film at FESPACO (the biennial Africa film festival) in Burkina Faso in February 2007. Nsanga Inshila will be available shortly online.
What became clear during the establishment of the Learning Circle was the transformation in the women participating in the filmmaking training themselves. And so, in extending the program to Zambia, Camfed wanted to capture on film the journey the women would embark on as filmmakers. With the consent of the workshop participants, documentary filmmakers David Eberts and Helen Cotton were there to chronicle the women’s transformation when the new program began in Samfya. The resulting documentary, Where the Water Meets the Sky, is narrated by Morgan Freeman and will premiere at the Atlanta Film Festival in April 2008. More information will shortly be available at www.watermeetssky.com.
In addition to the participatory filmmaking initiative and documentary, Camfed has produced and featured in other films, including a short promotional film of Camfed's work presented by Academy-award winning actor and Camfed patron, Morgan Freeman; a film on Camfed’s founder Ann Cotton in the Skoll Foundation’s Uncommon Heroes series celebrating social entrepreneurship, and short vignettes on some of the inspiring girls, young women and community members with whom Camfed works in Africa.
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