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A SPECIAL FILM PROGRAMME FOR REFUGEE WEEK
Moving Worlds is a programme of films available to watch at home during Refugee Week, a UK-wide festival celebrating the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees (15-21 June 2020). Moving Worlds is produced by Counterpoints Arts, which coordinates Refugee Week nationally.
In light of physical distancing restrictions, this year's programme is working digitally in order to facilitate home screenings and online post-screening conversations. Now more than ever, we realise the need to stay socially and personally connected and to share compelling storytelling journeys.
Responding to this year’s Refugee Week theme ‘Imagine’, the programme itself is re-imagined as a weekly film festival with a curated programme of features and shorts exploring personal experiences of forced displacement, stories of visualising one's future and past, as well as narratives of resilience, change and hope. In addition to the selected films generously offered by our network of filmmakers, we have also identified award-nominated films that can be accessed online via external websites.
We have chosen films that support the performance of many diverse voices and are dominated by powerful personal stories, such as the story of Paul and Millie Cao in Oscar-nominated Walk, Run, Cha-Cha, who transport us from the dance floor to the journey of their love story across the years. Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts' For Sama and Hassan Fazili’s Midnight Traveler bring into focus stories about and by individuals and their families, as they imagine and carve new futures with a camera or smartphone in hand. Both films celebrate innovative storytelling techniques while re-visioning documentary practice and first-person testimony. This year’s programme also features two short animation films (Escape from England & Space Refugees) for younger audiences by Claire Desenclos, asking us to imagine how we would respond to the reality of becoming a refugee and searching for a safe place to seek refuge.
We invite you to screen any of these films in the comfort and safety of your home. We hope that they can generate meaningful conversations in person or virtually - find out more in the Locations section. We have also designed downloadable post-screening guides to encourage lively conversations across all ages.
Our thanks to the creative and passionate filmmakers and producers who generously agreed to make their films available for Refugee Week 2020, Moving Worlds package. This year's programme is dedicated to all individuals currently experiencing forced displacement who may be experiencing precarious and challenging living conditions, especially during this uncertain time.
Here’s how you can access the films:
- Links to each film are available on the feature and short film pages during Refugee Week
- Watch anytime during Refugee Week, or follow our suggested schedule of films for each day of the week
Moving Worlds first ran in Dublin, Ireland (2008) as a collaboration between the Forum on Migration and Communications (FOMACS) and with support from the European Union National Institutes of Culture (EUNIC): Alliance Française, British Council, Goethe-Institut Ireland, Instituto Cervantes Dublin and the Austrian Embassy Dublin, in association with the Irish Film Institute.
Moving Worlds UK is curated and programmed by Nelli Stavropoulou for Counterpoints Arts
MOVING WORLDS 2020
FEATURES
An intimate and epic journey into the female experience of war. The story of Waad al-Kateab's life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while conflict rises around her.
Travelling, to feel at home: what are the colours of the world? A simple question and hundreds of kilometers to find an answer with a film camera, and a notebook. This is a trip of members Italian association Comunità XXIV Luglio, that works with disabled people, on the roads of central Italy to make a documentary that tells the phenomenon of the reception of migrants in small villages.
When the Taliban puts a bounty on Afghan director Hassan Fazili’s head, he is forced to flee with his wife and two young daughters. Entirely filmed using just mobile phones, the film captures the uncertain journey that over the course of three years takes the family from Tajikistan to Europe. In his film Fazili poetically shows firsthand the dangers facing refugees seeking asylum and the love shared between a family on the run.
Starting out on foot from Aleppo Syria, we followed the Nabi family for 3 months as they made their way through and the Idomeni refugee camp near Thessaloniki, Greece into the Balkans and through Hungary, Austria and eventually Berlin. Along the way they suffer countless setbacks and heartache—all captured by our cameras with startling intimacy.
This is Home
An intimate portrait of four Syrian refugee families arriving in America and struggling to find their footing. They attend cultural orientation classes and job training sessions where they must "learn America", and when the newly imposed travel ban adds further questions and complications, their strength and resilience are put to the test.
Credit: Still from 'I Migrati'
SHORTS
What if we were the refugees? What if we had to escape England? How could we get away? Would any country accept us? Suitable for adults and children aged 8 upwards.
One Cambodian Family Please For My Pleasure
In 1981, a lonely refugee from Czechoslovakia paints an all-too-appealing picture of her American life as she writes a letter begging an organisation to send a Cambodian refugee family so that she can help resettle them in her new 'hometown of dreams': Fargo, North Dakota.
A grandfather with his granddaughter escape their ruined planet in search of a time/place on earth that will accept them: Babylon 570 BC, Rome 100 AD or London 2018 AD? Suitable for adults and children aged 8 upwards.
After settling into her new life in America, a Syrian refugee receives a visit from her past.
Paul and Millie Cao lost their youth to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Forty years later, they have become successful professionals in Southern California and are rediscovering themselves on the dance floor.
Credit: Still from 'One Cambodian Family Please For My Pleasure'
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