12 young Afghans have come together to tell their migration stories in the film "Welcome to My Life." The production is part of a global participatory videomaking project run by the IOM.
A group of 12 young Afghan men and women with different stories and different ethnicities came together for a week in Herat, a city in the western Afghanistan, to share their experiences and to direct and produce a film on migration together.
This initiative is part of the Global Migration Film Festival Participatory Video Project, which is run by the International
Organisation for Migration (IOM). The goal is to engage migrants and host communities in participatory filmmaking that strengthens social cohesion.
Participants learn how to use a camera, frame images, tell a story using a microphone and make editorial decisions through consensus.
Giving a voice to Afghan women
"In Afghanistan, women often don't have a voice and we are here also to represent these voices," said Shokya, who with her friend Masoma, was one of five women in the group. Both Shokya and Masoma recently returned to their home country from Iran. The IOM project allowed the two women to handle a video camera and work with male colleagues for the first time.
Millions of Afghans have experienced migration, both forced and voluntary, in the past four decades. In 2017 alone, 460,000 undocumented Afghans returned or were deported from Iran, 100,000 from Pakistan and 7,000 from various European countries, according to IOM. In 2018, due to various factors including a deteriorating economic situation in Iran, tightening border controls in Turkey, and an ongoing drought in Afghanistan, over 500,000 undocumented people returned between January and July.
Promoting dialogue with video camera
The video was partly filmed in a camp for internally displaced people on the outskirts of Herat, which is home to more over 50,000 people driven from their homes by drought and conflict. Other sections were filmed in the gardens of the Manzar-e Jahad museum, which offers a panoramic view of the city, and in a community where facilitators led a participatory video editing session followed by a community screening.
At the end of the year, at the 3rd Global Migration Film Festival, an international version of the video "Welcome to Our Life" will be screened around the world.
"This participatory video project generates dialogue between groups affected by migration in different ways: internally displaced people, returnees or part of the Herati host community," said IOM Afghanistan Public Information Officer Eva Schwoerer.
A behind-the-scenes video of the project is available online.