Storytelling For All: Empowering Bedouin Women and Men through Film and Craft Impact and Engagement

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Following on from the Newton award winning work carried out in Jordan for OPOF, Storytelling for All (SFA) will enhance the value of Bedouin cultural heritage in South Sinai, Egypt, through the production of an artefact - a handcrafted community map wallhanging. This follow on project will develop and expand the handcrafting and storytelling methods used so successfully to increase the value of traditional heritage skills in Jordan to deliver a series of workshops for Bedouin communities in the South Sinai, Egypt.While the Jordan handcrafted map told many stories, our ability to document the story of the actual work involved was hampered by social restrictions that meant that female participants did not want to be filmed or photographed directly. Yet they also expressed a desire to be acknowledged and did not wish to remain anonymous. Invisibility of the makers was clearly a further barrier to perceptions of the value of their skilled artisanal work.These workshops will therefore incorporate a new filmmaking element helping to increase the focus on storytelling, overcome barriers to representation and inclusion, and increase impact through disemmination. Bespoke training in filmmaking will allow participants to determine themselves how they represent their work and will highlight and make visible the huge amount of undervalued knowledge and creativity held by Bedouin communities. Working with the same team of UK artists from OPOF, alongside Egyptian local partners, a filmmaker and residents of south Sinai, the project will deliver a series of skill-share based heritage focused workshops for women that will also including training the women to film and share their own process using smartphones. This will allow the participants to gain a sense of ownership over the outputs of the project and be empowered through the ability to control what is being represented as well as adopt a reflexive approach to their own accomplishments. Increasing the sense of ownership over the means of production and the means of representation of the production the project highlights the value of intangible cultural heritage as a means of female intergenerational knowledge transfer and production. The workshops will also deliver a high level of valuable and transferable skills training through a skill-share model with participants acting as both students and trainers.This project will deliver a further new element of heritage focused filmmaking workshops for men allowing them to collect and discuss and disseminate stories that reflect on the cultural heritage of Bedouin guides and guardians of a fragile and harsh landscape. Workshops for men will offer training in storytelling using filmmaking. They will be trained how to use smartphones to make short films and distribute these short films on social media. Adding filmmaking workshops for male relatives to promote their tourist enterprises (which include accommodation (camps), restaurants, trekking and guiding, and marketing souvenirs and herbal remedies) through digital storytelling will widen the economic and social benefit. In this way the project will ensure gender equality and poverty alleviation for the communities involved. Designing workshop activities around a shared heritage are also processes that will facilitate collaboration in other ways. The use of bespoke gender specific workshops will allow participants to use film to represent themselves, their landscape, their work and their home in a way they are comfortable with - choosing what to show and what not to show. Combining filmmaking with crafting to tell heritage stories that will be screened, exhibited and shared online will allow the local community to reach a wider international audience beyond direct tourist visitors to the region.