Pacific Community Filmmaking and Gender, Impact and Public Engagement

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Gender inequality in the Pacific is a serious challenge and a sensitive issue - requiring a culturally appropriate and joined-up development approach to support and drive the necessary social changes. The prevalence of violence against women in the Pacific region is among the highest in the world, whilst women's parliamentary participation is amongst the lowest in the world. Countries across the Pacific region have put in place policy strategies, legal frameworks and a raft of initiatives, but against their own and internationally accepted indicators there has been poor progress towards gender equality, despite the development cooperation efforts of many donors over several decades. The AHRC/GCRF Research Networking Project, Exploring Participatory Filmmaking as a Development Method to address Gender Inequality in the Pacific (2017/2018) and the SFC-GCRF Pacific Connections: Community Filmmaking and Gender Inequality in the Pacific (2018/19) projects have highlighted and brought together an emerging body of Pacific-made participatory documentary films and filmmakers. Their work opens up alternative routes to understand and influence gender inequality in the Pacific by enabling communities to tell their own stories through their own cultural terms. In their own analyses of events and actions, Pacific peoples point to the importance of differentiating gender within particular social, collective and kinship relations and of the nuances and sensitivities of promoting rights-based issues such as gender inequality and GBV within a communal society. Significantly, these projects have brought to the fore the impact the processes of participatory production have on individuals and communities involved, and how projects can be seen as multi layered, locally embedded and culturally sensitive approaches to achieving gender based policy objectives. This proposed international community filmmaking project will enhance filmmakers' and organisations' capacity to work with communities around issues of gender inequality and to use this work as drivers for social change. Based on outcomes from the AHRC/GCRF previous projects, this project will target support at training and mentoring for community filmmakers and emerging talent. It will produce media projects on gender related themes across the Pacific that will create impact for participants and audiences during and after production. It will develop audiences through cross platform screenings & events that bring together communities, funders, organisations, Government and stakeholders. Though training, production, distribution and public engagement the project will seek to visibly advocate for the validity of the emerging Pacific Filmmakers Consortium, and a sustainable and locally generated approach to contextualising and enacting change around gender equality. The proposed project will build on the Pacific Filmmakers Consortium network, with media projects, filmmaker and public training and programmes of distribution and stakeholder, government and NGO engagement in ODA LMIC and UMC countries - PNG (including Bougainville Island), Samoa, Solomon Islands, Fiji, Tuvalu, Tonga and Vanuatu. It has the potential to also include and bring into this network practitioners and communities in Marshall Islands and Kiribati. This multi strand approach has the objective of contributing to creative development methods to support the challenge of promoting gender equality in the Pacific.