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Director: Marah Al Hassan, Khaldiya Jibawi, Raghad Al Khatib, Walaa Al Alawi, Bushra Al Masri, Rafif Al Fadel, Muna Al Hariri
Only two years into the war, over 3,500 journalists had traveled through the Camp Za’atari to tell stories of the Syrian people who were forced out of their country to live in exile in Jordan. The stories told were somewhat black and white and largely tragic. In response to the mainstream media reporting of the refugee experience, two workshops were organized to give Syrian girls living as refugees in Jordan’s camps and urban areas cameras and the chance to tell their own stories.
The workshops, one in Jordan’s Za’atari Refugee Camp and the other in the city of Irbid in northern Jordan, engaged Syrian girls in artistic and technical training in photo and video to reflect on and tell their own stories in first person. With cameras, microphones and pens in hand, the girls set out to document their everyday lives – how it looks, feels and sounds from the ground, at the heart of their world.
For these girls, storytelling offers the possibility not just to change the trajectories of their own personal stories but to offer this possibility of change to other girls, and to give alternative ways of seeing to people in their communities and to the world beyond.
The workshops were developed and facilitated by documentary filmmaker/educator Laura Doggett with documentary animator/educator Tasneem Toghoj. Laura Doggett will be present during the screening and will participate in a talkback with the audience following the film.
