Project blog

Project #5 – Ongoing

لمجتمعنا (For our Society ) – Bringing you the power of film.

It all started with the conviction that if, we can create awareness through entertainment, such as films and if we can contribute to values of equality, non-discrimination and participation – then we needed to create a film festival.

The project has had its ups and downs, like most projects. But we got to say that mostly has been positive in its ups. Most especially we are very excited that we are able to contribute to a society that is growing with an interest to create a change, worried about what is happening now and what will come if we continue to do things as usual.

The first part of the project was choosing films with one question in mind “what films can we screen that are relevant to the local population, that can create awareness and that is inspiring to act?”. We were very lucky to find Cinema Politica who are in Canada. They were able to provide us with a long list of excellent movies that we could screen. This meant hours of watching movies and then having the difficult to choose only a few. We chose three long documentaries and one short movies: Solar Mamas, Cultures of Resistance and Being Osama and the short documentary We Can Do It.

The second part was choosing a possible place where we could screen the movies. We had many wonderful options, but like all of our projects, we are always looking to work with new partners and extend our networks. This time we worked together with Al Shaheed Park, a beautify park located at the center of the city of Kuwait. The staff at Al Shaheed Park were wonderful, helping us with anything that we needed with staff always with us through out the screening to make sure that all would go as planned.

Also, we created a special page on our website where people could take a look at the activities, including a short bio of the speakers who would be presenting. In this page you can also check the schedule as well as have access to the toolkit that we created.

The toolkit is a compilation of resources for the general public to know what to do in case they would like to learn about particular human rights issues or if they would like to be more active with the local civil society. For this also local NGOs were contacted, who provided us with their contact information for us to share in the toolkit. The toolkit is also available online and you can find it here.

Through our partnership with Cinema Politica, we also had the privilege to be part of their local spotlight, a special place on their newsletter highlighting work around the world with their partnership. It is an article where you can read more about this initiative and about what we are trying to achieve as an organization. To read the complete article, you can find it here.

“Cinema Politica would not be Cinema Politica without the dedicated and tireless groups, organizations and volunteers running our locals. To highlight this incredible work, we periodically zoom in on individual locals and in doing so, learn about their specific activities, histories, challenges, triumphs, and more. These stories help us paint a picture of the sprawling abstract thing known as “Cinema Politica”. For our ninth spotlight, we asked one of our newest locals, CP Kuwait – Project 189 to send us their thoughts. Check out their beautiful response below!”

For each screening day we prepared a survey, this was a crucial part since it would help us to understand whether we should do something different, whether the films can create change, whether the films chosen were the correct ones, etc. So after each film we asked everyone to help us by filling us the survey.

Surprisingly was successful! our other option was to have a survey filled up by paper, as it is commonly done, but then this would leave us the difficult work to make any sense of the data gathered. Doing it via internet, we are able to automatically gather the data and put it together. This was excellent.

The three days of screening came and went very fast. Met wonderful people, received lots of feedback. We are now on the phase where we are preparing to continue our screenings and get better at it. We are looking at dates, venues, films to screen and most importantly, what specific and measurable impact do we want to have.