FilmAid Kenya runs film schools in refugee camps, and each year the organization trains dozens of young filmmakers in the Kakuma and Dadaab camps. Some FilmAid Kenya graduates go on to work as wedding photographers and freelance video journalists—jobs that have surprising demand in the camps. FilmAid Kenya’s most lasting contribution, however, is empowering young people to tell their personal stories. Many of the beautiful, often surprising, films made by FilmAid Kenya’s students have gone on to win film festival awards and, contribute to the global conversation about refugees. When the films do not find audiences outside the camps, there is a cathartic power in the act of communicating. FilmAid Kenya has also built a creative community within the refugee camps; students and graduates spend time at the FilmAid Kenya compound on their days off, even when the power supply is routinely suspended, disabling the cameras and editing stations.

I first met FilmAid Kenya’s leadership team in September 2015. During Barack Obama’s last address to the United Nations General Assembly as president of the United States, he spoke about global refugees. “[I]n the face of suffering families,” he explained, “our nation of immigrants sees ourselves.” He called on countries to work together to address the plight of refugees, because “We live in an integrated world—one in which we all have a stake in each other’s success.”Footnote 1

While President Obama spoke uptown, the State Department organized a concurrent meeting downtown at the New School for Social Research. A small panel discussion and breakout session convened NGOs, media companies, and social media platforms to address representations of refugees. Future First Lady Dr. Jill Biden spoke about a woman she had met on her recent trip to the Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya. The actor Ben Stiller, who would later become a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, talked about meeting with Syrian refugees his foundation supported. And a Syrian refugee, Faiza Gareb, spoke about her journey to the U.S. Together, they called on the media makers and distributors in the room to tell stories about individual immigrant experiences in order to combat thinking about migration demographically and to counter the omnipresent political rhetoric—and propaganda—about refugees.

Several organizations shared projects that were already underway. The advertising company Ogilvy, for example, showed off its mockup of a refugee flag based on the fluorescent-striped orange design of life preservers. Between planned presentations, participants informally learned about each other’s work and shared ideas; some started to collaborate.

I was invited to the New School meeting because the previous year I had been a State Department Arts Envoy to Myanmar, a project that resulted in me making a short film about Myanmar’s straight-to-DVD film industry. At the event, I became excited by the work of FilmAid Kenya. Founded in 1999 by film producer Caroline Baron, FilmAid International started by showing educational and entertainment films in Macedonian refugee camps, and gradually developed into a global refugee film school.

After the conference, FilmAid International’s Executive Director, Keefe Murren, and I wondered what would happen if we brought together FilmAid Kenya students and my University of Pennsylvania students. With an inaugural grant from Penn’s Making a Difference in Diverse Communities program, I took a group of Penn students to Kakuma in the summer of 2017.

Collaborative Filmmaking

At the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, FilmAid Kenya and Penn students worked together to make a series of short informational films commissioned by the United Nations. The films explained the U.N. services available at a new refugee settlement, Kalobeyei, adjacent to the Kakuma Camp. The films would be used by the U.N. as part of an orientation for new arrivals.

The Kalobeyei Settlement takes a novel approach to refugee resettlement. Following the principles of the U.N.’s 2016 New York Declaration,Footnote 2 the Kalobeyei Settlement is designed to return agency to refugees by giving them more choice over their living situations and allowing them to create a marketplace. The post-World War II vision of refugee camps as temporary safe spaces has slowly disappeared as they have become lifelong domiciles for migrants who may never return to their home countries.

Kakuma, like most refugee camps, was designed as a temporary waystation for refugees, but it has developed into a large, permanent city. The Kakuma camp has existed for over a quarter-century and has close to 200,000 residents. Unable to return to South Sudan, Somalia, and other countries, camp residents are in a perpetual state of waiting. Not only can’t they return home; they are legally prevented from earning a living or entering the Kenyan workforce. At this point, a whole generation of African children have grown up only knowing the camp. The Kenyan government has continually attempted to shutter both Kakuma and Dadaab, with no real plan for their current inhabitants.

The Kalobeyei Settlement was designed from the beginning as a perpetual community rather than a temporary camp. New arrivals are given credit to purchase a house that meets their needs. When we were there, the Kalobeyei homes were still built out of corrugated metal like those in the refugee camps, but the foundation of brick dwellings was starting to appear. Kalobeyei inhabitants get credit to use in the market, purchasing the items they need rather than receiving predetermined rations of food and supplies. The allotments are small, but they allow for choice and agency. Each house comes with a small kitchen garden, which tenants can use for subsistence farming and to grow crops they can sell in the market. Green gardens with short stalks were just starting to sprout when we were there in 2017. Perhaps most tellingly, the local Turkana Kenyans were choosing to live in the Kalobeyei Settlement in order to access the U.N.’s services and nascent economy.

The FilmAid Kenya-Penn student films explained the workings of the Kalobeyei housing, water, education, health, and other systems as well as the expanding marketplace. Teams made up of 3-4 Penn students and 3-4 FilmAid graduates researched the systems they were assigned, with the FilmAid students of course taking the lead. The teams then shared the responsibility for conducting interviews, filming B-roll, and editing their films.

The “water team,” for example, followed the route of water delivery from trucks to water towers to pipelines to buckets to homes. The team quickly realized the hopefulness of sprouting kitchen gardens; it takes a lot of optimism to pour a scarce resource into the ground. The “health team” explained how to navigate the small Kalobeyei hospitals. One film focused on a service classified by the U.N. as “Protection.” The Protection services include offices for reporting gender-based and sexual violence as well as support for refugees recovering from violence. One surprise for this team was that a traveling Protection unit gave massages to residents of Kalobeyei, practicing a holistic approach to rebuilding lives after displacement.

Another team’s film explained the fast-growing school system in Kalobeyei. One school had grown to three, and in each school, the FilmAid Kenya and Penn filmmakers saw parents who had not previously had access to education, sitting in elementary school classes next to their children. Like most of the other teams, the education film crew decided to tell the story of one individual student within their film on the larger system. The education team woke up before dawn one morning with Thothamoi, who was at the time the only girl in her middle school. The team walked the 45 minutes to school with Thothamoi, and they spent the day shooting cinema verité-style footage of her experience. Answering the New School panel participants’ appeal, the film teams focused on stories of individuals (Figs. 1, 2, 3, and 4).

Fig. 1
A photograph of two men. One holds and adjusts the camera to capture a picture. Another man stands behind him.

Members of the UPenn and Kakuma team documenting the healthcare system capture B-roll

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Fig. 2
A photograph. A boy takes a selfie with a group of boys and a girl among them.

Part of the UPenn and Kakuma team documenting the water system takes a selfie

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Fig. 3
A photograph of a team. A man captures video through the camera which is placed before him while two women watch it. A man who is crouched wears headphones.

Members of the UPenn and Kakuma team conduct an interview with a resident

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Fig. 4
A photograph of 3 people. A woman wears headphones and a man beside her looks at the camera kept in front of them.

Members of the UPenn and Kakuma document the food distribution system

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There were certainly complications to team dynamics. There were language barriers; one team communicated mostly in French, a second language for most of its members. Also, there were differing gender expectations that the teams had to navigate. But there were also many reasons that the FilmAid Kenya and Penn program successfully built relationships across teams. The project wasn’t an instance of one group teaching another. Both the FilmAid Kenya and Penn students were talented filmmakers who shared their expertise with each other. And this wasn’t a charitable mission, although we did leave behind some cameras and computers. The groups were all working together to reach a common goal, and, importantly, it was not an abstract goal. They were creating films that would be (and have in fact been) valuable to new arrivals at the Kalobeyei Settlement. The films have been viewed by thousands of new arrivals to Kalobeyei.

More than just pursuing a shared mission, the teams gained a shared respect for each other. FilmAid students are incredibly driven, and being accepted into the program isn’t an easy journey. Before enrolling at FilmAid Kenya, the refugees had to resist the many pressures that caused their peers to leave primary and secondary school. They resisted the strong pull to take jobs that could help support their families, and many of the girls fought family pressure to enter into early marriages. FilmAid Kenya students pursued their passion to learn filmmaking rather than do something with a more immediate payoff, clearly an almost universal experience for artists. The hardworking Penn and FilmAid Kenya students recognized themselves in each other.

Virtual Reality

While the students worked long days, many of them woke up extra early to assist me with another film project: a short virtual reality film about life in Kalobeyei. I had only started working in 360 video and virtual reality (VR) when I attended the State Department’s New School meeting. I was excited by new high-end advances in VR being made by Oculus and HTC, but I was equally excited by the growing market for consumer VR cameras and the YouTube VR app that gave anyone with a mobile phone the ability to have a 360-video viewing experience.

The call to tell stories about refugees immediately sparked ideas about using VR to be able to put viewers in an unfamiliar space and create a connection to the refugees. I wasn’t the only VR filmmaker to have this idea. A number of VR films from this period attempted to recreate the experience of refugees, most famously Gabo Arora and Chris Milk’s U.N.-sponsored Clouds Over Sidra (2015).

VR is often mistakenly discussed as a medium that recreates reality whole. You place a camera in a space and suddenly you’ve captured it. But, of course, VR cameras and software mediate experiences rather than simply capturing them. There are several aspects of VR’s mediation that makes it ideal for connecting with novel experiences and filtering those experiences through the eyes of others.

Some of the great affordances of VR are embodiment (or presence), connection between viewer and subject, and active learning. When you put on a VR headset, you occupy the image, taking up space in a way that you do not in other media. If the camera is placed too low, for example, a viewer might feel like she is inhabiting a child’s body. If the camera is too high, conversely, the viewer has the feeling of floating. In addition to the sense of presence, VR connects viewers with three-dimensional representations of others that creates empathetic attachments unlike anything achieved in flat video. Finally, a VR viewer has the freedom to look and sometimes move around. They can actively engage with a scene unfolding around them and create a variety of routes through it. This freedom, I would argue, encourages a deeper learning experience.

VR has been around in different forms for decades, but the styles and codes of using it to tell stories are still emerging. Part of the excitement for the FilmAid Kenya and Penn students in creating a VR film was trying out new storytelling techniques.

The short 7.5-minute VR film that we created, as I have seen over and over again, helps bring Kalobeyei to life for viewers in a way that still photos, text, and even video cannot. The film is simply a series of long takes that reveal families working their kitchen garden or a father and daughter preparing for the market to open. I think the most impactful sequences take place in the Kalobeyei primary school. When I have shown still photographs of these classrooms, they tend to reinforce peoples’ preconceptions: the classrooms are overcrowded, under-resourced, and sad. Learning can’t happen there. But when the same viewers put on a VR headset, the Kalobeyei classes come alive for all of the aforementioned reasons. Viewers feel present in the classroom, the students and teacher have volume, and viewers are free to look around. Viewers can choose to look at the teacher in front of the classroom, putting themselves in the position of a student. Or they can look at the student sitting next to them, having the experience filtered through the student’s facial expression and gestures. You can feel the energy, optimism, and learning in the room.

The most powerful sequence at the school is clearly the one set in the kitchen. The Kalobeyei school kitchen is a small structure with corrugated metal walls and a dirt floor in which a few women cook lunch for 3500 children in two gigantic vats. Hearing about the cook’s miraculous task in the voice-over is awe-inspiring, but the power comes from the intimacy of being alone in the dark room with one of the cooks. More than the other scenes, it achieved the melding of medium and mission, connecting viewers to a refugee’s everyday experience.

After Kalobeyei

If this project had ended with this one summer class, I don’t think it would have been a success. But the engagement with FilmAid Kenya, participatory filmmaking, and virtual reality has continued.

Back at Penn, the students who went to Kalobeyei started the Penn FilmAid Club devoted to social action filmmaking. The club won a prize for civic engagement from the university’s president and provost in its first year, and the students have continued to make films with and about the FilmAid students and about refugees. Among other projects, Sonari Chidi’s film, Shattering Refuge, shot in part at Kakuma, has gone on to win many film festival awards.

I regularly teach a Virtual Reality Lab class that continues the work started with the Kalobeyei VR film. In 2018, the VR Lab class collaborated with refugee resettlement agencies and programs in Philadelphia. One group from this class partnered with the organization Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Association Coalition (SEAMAAC) to make a VR film about the organization’s food truck. Many refugees want to start businesses that use their cooking skills, but starting a new business, especially a restaurant, is difficult. SEAMAAC’s ingenious solution was to purchase a food truck they lend to refugees to cater events or set up at a park. The students’ VR film is a view from inside the food truck, offering a glimpse into the frenetic pace and precision of cooking inside the truck.

Although it is a film about SEAMAAC’s food truck project, it is told through the experience of two married refugee couples who have used the truck to start catering businesses. One of the couples, who are from Myanmar, successfully launched a business that grew into the largest sushi supplier to Philadelphia grocery stores. When we held an event to discuss and show the student films, one member of the couple, ZarZo, was not only the most eloquent speaker on the panel—she also catered the event from the food truck.

I have since taken students to Puerto Rico, where we used VR to capture the work of artists confronting climate change refugees and other issues after Hurricane Maria. And I have worked with students to make the documentary Dreaming of Jerusalem about Ethiopian Jewish refugees waiting to emigrate to Israel. In 2022, I returned to Kakuma with another group of students. We partnered with FilmAid Kenya and its students to create an online course based on FilmAid’s film training program. 

These projects have been most successful when they fulfill the mission set out at the New School: when they individualize the refugee experience at the level of production, storytelling, and viewer experience. While refugees lack basic necessities, and filmmaking may seem to some like a luxury, working with refugees to tell their stories and other stories about the refugee experience is a fundamental step in changing the global narrative, affecting political change, and sparking greater understanding.