Overview

Communities in crisis need information and empowerment. FilmAid provides both, to millions of people suffering the effects of war, poverty, displacement and disaster. Films offer a way to reach many people at once, overcoming language and literacy boundaries, providing information where it is needed and inspiring hope where it is lacking. In post-crisis emergencies and protracted situations alike, FilmAid produces and distributes community-based films on critical public health and safety issues such as maternal health, HIV, cholera, gender-based violence, conflict resolution, and more. Using inflatable screens and other ‘Mobile Cinema’ units, FilmAid screenings provide psychological relief and healing to refugees and other communities ravaged by trauma and lacking traditional media and information sources. Through FilmAid’s training program, young people develop production skills and self-empowerment that will outlast displacement and gain a platform to tell their own stories, in their own voices.

FilmAid was founded during the Balkan crisis in 1999 by award-winning producer Caroline Baron (Capote, Monsoon Wedding) after she learned the most prevalent problem for the hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees was trauma and unrelenting hopelessness. Since then, FilmAid has worked in partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other global aid organizations to bring psychological relief, critical information, and training to more than two million people worldwide. FilmAid currently works in Kenya, in the large refugee camps of Dadaab and Kakuma as well as informal settlements in Nairobi and Mombassa; with Burmese refugees in Thailand; and in Haiti.

FilmAid is a global federation of nonprofit, charitable organizations with a shared mission to use the power of film and media to transcend language and literacy, bringing life-saving information, psychological relief and much-needed hope to refugees and other communities