2017-22: The Creative Documentary Workshop for Women Filmmakers & The Rough-Cut Workshop in Egypt

This project aims to contribute to furthering women’s representation in public life in Egypt and highlight their viewpoints and concerns through film. The project empowers young women with a powerful communication tool – filmmaking – within a sector which is heavily dominated by male directors and stereotypic views of women. Through training and capacity building women film directors improve their professionalism and find their own cinematographic language.

Gender inequality is prevalent in film production globally, both in the proportion of female characters, the lack of girls and women as protagonists or co-stars, the issues addressed and the shortage of women behind the camera. Also in Egypt and the MENA region the film industry is nourished by a discriminatory and sexist context. As a result, female representation reproduces a view framed in a patriarchal system of unequal power relations between men and women. To have more women behind the camera, as scriptwriters and directors has been proved a successful way to change the stereotypical representations of women in film.

The Rough-Cut Workshop is an audiovisual consultation that is offered to women filmmakers who are in the phase of working on the first rough-cut of their cinematographic work and need support regarding the content and the development of their film on an artistic and editing level.

The Creative Documentary Workshop for Women Filmmakers is a five-months training on artistic techniques of directing, editing, cinematography and production. It targets to improve the skills and capacities of Egypt’s new women filmmakers to serve the higher goal of empowering young women in the audiovisual sector. Through a one week workshop with different assignments a batch of eight young women film makers are selected for an intensive five month hands on training workshop. In light of the relative absence of film schools and workshops that teach creative documentary film in Egypt, the objectives of the workshop are:

• To train new women filmmakers in audiovisual and documentary filmmaking.
• Offer young women new tools that empower them professionally and socially.
• Support young women to have access to new ways of expression and enable them to use creative documentary as a tool to communicate the problems and challenges faced by Egyptian women.
• Strengthen collective thinking among women so that, through group work, they can reach a common language that reflects the perspective of Egyptian women and help articulate their reality.
• Strengthen gender equality by providing young women with new opportunities to perform professionally and artistically.

The final outcome will be the production of 6 to 8 short (maximum five minutes) creative documentary films.

The documentaries will be screened during the film weeks of the Cairo International Women Film Festival Caravan “Between Women Filmmakers.”

For more information: check the Facebook-page.