This film is telling our story of the “world as it is” entirely co-produced by the Stronger Together leaders.
These leaders have, week by week during lockdown, continued to be there for each other and, through what sometimes was a very difficult journey, remembered, shared, laughed, cried, and reflected on the UK hostile environment and eventually decided to take action.
This work has been possible thanks to the initial funding Creating Ground received from Near Neighbours which helped us initiate the Stronger Together group, the guidance from Paulina Tamborell-Signoret, our Citizens UK organiser, the support and trust from Professor Tracey Reynolds from the University of Greenwich and the directing and facilitating skills of our Film Director Anna Merryfield.
We made this film using a participatory approach, which meant that every member of the group participated equally in every stage of making the film: from discussing the themes we wanted to tackle, to considering different approaches to depicting these themes, to submitting footage in response to a task set each week, to writing the script, deciding how to tell our stories and assessing multiple edits of the film and giving feedback and suggesting changes. Collaboration is fundamental to the way we operate as a group, so it was obvious for us to take this approach to making the film.
The result is an incredible display of the diverse talents possessed by our group, who contributed poetry, songs and beautiful footage and more, as you will see. The whole process was underpinned by the Citizen’s UK framework: the world as it is, the world as it should be, and what we can do to take us from one state to the other.
This film is all about telling our story of the “world as it is” such as hostile environment to people in the immigration system, social exclusion, deprivation, poverty, lack of access to healthcare, social care, and education, poor physical and mental health, precarious conditions, lack of sense of purpose, which all affect some of us or someone we know.
This film was made to show the true narrative of the reality affecting people in the immigration system to people and policy makers in order to create awareness of the reality, evoke and stimulate a response that will bring about policies rooted in humanity, fairness, compassion, empathy, inclusion, equality and dignity for all that will bring us closer to the “world as it should be”.
Since our launch of the film on 14th October 2020 we will we working on a series of actions, driven by messages of hope from all those who attended. Please follow us to find out more about our next steps.
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