Newsletter Spring 2020

March 20, 2020

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CSFilm & Coronavirus

We hope you and yours are staying healthy in these difficult times. All CSFilm NIRV Screen&Discuss events have been postponed through early April. We hope that public health will allow events to continue in mid-April and for others to be rescheduled. In any case, the most important thing is that we do everything we can to help stop the spread of the virus.

As described below, we are working on a series of initiatives to promote the online usage of the NIRV films and discussion resources:

NIRV-at-home

Watch and discuss the NIRV films with your home-bound family and friends. We will be making the full versions of a selection of the NIRV films available online each week. Our hope is that you can use this time together at home to watch and discuss the films and deepen your understanding of immigration issues.

Webinars and Virtual Gatherings

We are also exploring opportunities to do webinars and virtual gatherings. The webinars will be organized by topic and include a selection of films, expert discussants, filmmakers and subjects. We will be in touch as we organize these activities and will look for your help with promotion and participation.

Collaborations
USAHello will be sharing all ten of the NIRV films as part of Voices – their online platform for refugees and immigrants to tell their own stories. They will post a new film every month so that their audience can join in celebrating the contributions that new Americans make to our society.USAHello is the largest multilingual online hub for information and education for refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and receiving communities in the USA.

NIRV events – post virus

We continue to organize NIRV events across the country.We are looking for NIRV Screen & Discuss venues that attract people with a range of social, economic and political perspectives such as, libraries, YM/YWCAs, religious groups, fraternal organizations and community colleges.Can you host an event or put us in touch with people that might? We have event planning resources, discussion guides, Action Toolkits and much more available to help with the organizing of impactful events. We welcome your ideas and suggestions. Please call or email us at (857) 415-0564 or info[at]csfilm[dot]org

NIRV Themes
NIRV Themes are a great way to engage with the different subjects covered by the ten films in the New Immigrant and Refugee Visions film collection. Use these themes to organize a discussion about immigrant and refugee issues in your home, community or organization. Read more about these themes online.

Immigrant contributions to America
Refugees in America
Women immigrants
Acculturation and assimilation
Religious faith and freedom
Celebrating immigrant cultures
Immigration and refugee policy
Immigrants at work
Immigrant origins: Africa, Asia and the Caribbean

Haiti Training Postponed

Community Supported Film was working hard with the Haitian online news site, AyiboPost, on a new series of trainings for video-journalists in Haiti. With great disappointment we had to postpone the program due to instability in Haiti and the potential impact of coronavirus on the training, which we planned to start at the end of March.

Our hope was to add to the impact of CSFilm’s 2014 Owning Our Future – Haitian Perspectives in Film training, production and public engagement work.

Like too many places planet-wide, Haitians are being beaten down by weak governance, poor accountability in international aid and the perpetuation of gross economic inequality. Unlike many others their story is seldom being heard. We hope in the future to rekindle our efforts to support the resolve of Haitian journalists to strengthen their voices and skills.

NIRV Filmmaker lands production job with WCVB-TV Ch 5 News

Abdirahman Abdi, director of Worlds Apart at Home, was hired in February by WCVB-TV as a freelance videographer and editor.

Abdi shoots, edits and packages content for TV and online broadcast and works with the Assignment Desk and Reporters to cover daily stories. WCVB will surely benefit from his diverse skill set. Read more.

CSFilm Haiti Coordinator attending NYU’s Masters in Journalism

Ralph Thomassaint Joseph is a Haitian multimedia journalist based in Haiti currently serving as the Editor in Chief at AyiboPost. In September he will begin a two years masters program at NYU.

Ralph led the implementation of CSFilm’s 2014 training and the production of Owning Our Future – Haitian Perspectives in Film. Read More

We are in great need of assistance as we cope with the restrictions to our work caused by the coronavirus. Thank you for your support.

Community Supported Film (CSFilm) trains women and men in under- and mis-represented communities to effectively communicate their pressing issues through documentary filmmaking. Their films are used in local and international Screen&Discuss campaigns to inform public opinion and policy from town halls to the halls of congress.

We focus on people, places and situations – be they in Afghanistan, Haiti, or the US – that the public hears a lot about in the news but seldom understands from the local perspective.