Film
I love film. It is well suited to help disseminate and deepen peace processes and human rights monitoring, as part of strategic communications and advocacy, and to counter narratives of violence in mass media and through socials. I am also increasingly interested in film’s purely expressive value, both for personal experimention and as a cultural necessity for a healthy society.
Disillusioned with urban life, Amol embarks on an odyssey of self reflection and re-connection with his motherland South Sudan. [director, short drama, 20 mins, coming soon]
Shep herds cattle across the bush of South Sudan, when a brutal disruption to his way of life forces him to confront the violence shaping his new nation. [director, short drama, 6 mins]
For this film, we went in In Search of Peace. And we found it through courageous peacebuilders standing up to the forces of violence, and winning. Delivered as a feature documentary in 9 standalone acts, our intention was to challenge the logic and narrative of violence in South Sudan. [director, documentary, 58 mins]
A series of VR/360 shorts taking the viewer into the homes and minds of Palestinian and Syrian refugees in southern Lebanon. Matan Rochlitz, Gaby Jamal and I aimed to capture something meaningful about the idea of Home, and in doing so surface our shared humanity. [director, documentaries, 3 x 5 mins]
Ben Pygall and I were proud to make one of the very first Virtual Reality/360 films created for political advocacy. We teamed up with Amnesty International to bring it to high-level folk at the United Nations Headquarters in New York and the African Union in Addis Ababa. We also created films for the United Nations News Service IRIN and others. [director/editor, documentaries, 4-12 mins]
South Sudan To Be follows my friends, a group of theatre-makers, as they struggle against the odds to represent their new country in the Cultural Olympiad at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. The war is over but the battle for the country is in full swing, and the arts are on the frontline. [director, documentary, 68 minutes]
I traveled to Eastern Sudan via Eritrea to investigate a hidden conflict, resulting in films for Al Jazeera International’s People and Power and PBS’s Foreign Exchange. Thanks also to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting for their support. [director, documentary, 20 minutes]
It was heartbreaking to visit these kids for this RTL Nederlands documentary. I knew Beshir’s Government of Sudan was using the story for propoganda, but still felt it should be told. The children said they had been recruited in western Sudan and Chad, given drugs and used in the JEM attack of Omdurman. We also meet camp leaders along the Sudan/Chad border, who paint a similarly grim picture. [director/editor, documentary, 20 minutes]
Undermanned and under resourced, the peacekeeping force in Darfur is losing the trust of those it was meant to protect. Made in association with the Pulitzer Centre, this short piece exposing conditions on the ground aired on PBS. [director/editor, documentary, 7 minutes]
Shot at in Darfur tells the story of an attack on a peacekeeping convoy in Sudan’s Darfur region. For this I worked with Susan’s Sculman’s footage to create a short doc for Guardian Films [director/editor, documentary, 7 minutes]
