Cinema for Refugees Social Inclusion

Context: Now that we are living through a humanitarian calamity of historic proportions with individuals facing complex and painful processes in their adaptive pathways to European societies, we believe films can and should more often convey successful stories of refugees’ social inclusion in their newly adopted homeland. But is it really so? Have the negative social beliefs surrounding refugees been replaced by those of social inclusion more in tune with developments in multicultural societies? Are the achievements of former well-included refugees into EU societies, where they live today, sufficiently or prominently displayed enough, highlighting a central modelling role, that newcomers’ can aspire to? Objectives: RefugeesIN stands for adult learning opportunities to social inclusion by critical analysis of European cinema and documentary film making on inspiring refugees' life stories. The purpose was to create an exploitable Pack of innovative and creative cinema-based assets for empowering, extending and developing adult educators (and social work staff) competencies, so that they are able to take an active stand against all forms of discrimination and racism, to meet the needs of adult learners (refugees/asylum seekers) from diverse backgrounds, to impart common fundamental values and to prevent and combat xenophobia, intolerance and promote their social inclusion. Cinema is used as a tool for breaching stereotypes and portraying actual and inspiring life stories of well-included former refugees and having a modelling role for the newcomers’ social inclusion. Partnership: six participating organisations, most with a joint history of cooperative work at European level, covering the expertise required and mobilising a team of highly skilled professionals on psychology, active citizenship, social inclusion and refugee issues, educational/training fields/ technical and methodological research methods. It was strengthened by a Greece partner, without experience in the ERAMUS+ programme, but with the unique expertise of a NGO exclusively dedicated to refugee issues and member of European Council on Refugees and Exiles /ECRE. The partners came from diverse geographical areas, socio-historical and cultural backgrounds, core business and type of organisations: Research-action, HR Consulting & Adult Learning Provider; Adult Education Agencies, Nationwide civil society organisation, a Faculty School of Film, Art & Creative Technologies and an NGO, expert in refugee issues. The Consortium was pooling together the required expertise in the financial, technical and scientific areas as well as in European experience to fulfil the objectives. Main activities: 1) Desk research - qualitative techniques on social inclusion and role modelling literature review and EU cinematography review, selecting paradigmatic feature-length films on refugees’ social inclusion; 2) Collecting, by interviews, social inclusion successful life stories of former refugees; 3) Testing the Course and Producing 12 short documentaries films, within cinema workshops, where multicultural teams (educators and refugees) shoot the films; 4) Creating a methodological Guide for the best use of the assets; 5) Editing and Packing the assets; 6) ensuring quality of the outputs; 6) promoting the outcomes by regular communication and involvement of the target audience and stakeholders in Project activities and dedicated events and 7) ensuring project visibility and sustainability.Results and impact: 1) the RefugeesIN brand image that established an identity and positive image of the project. The logo is an appealing and symbolic graphic mark aiding to promote instant public recognition of the name of the project and its main topic; 2) the RefugeesIN Package - with Brochure, Film Catalogue, Course (Curriculum and Manual) and Guide, in six languages PT; DE; IT; SL: EN; and EL, was widely promoted by all the partners, at different levels and by diversified means and channels.The short-term impact can be measured by the people reached by the valorisation activity undertaken during the life time of the project, being remarkable the total number achieved of 87.291 individuals / organisations, which almost doubled the result in the interim report of 44.000 and that is almost 12 times the foreseen number in the application (7.426).Longer-term benefits: after the project end, the impact will be measured by the number of users of the dedicated website, social media page and channels well as attendance of activities foreseen (RefugeesIN KA1 Course and yearly Conferences & Film Festivals) and the level of compliance and scope of the exploitation strategies established by each of the partners. At the moment there are already 19 organisations / professionals who declare that they are using / intend to use the package and the resources produced in their professional activity, so we can say that RefugeesIN is already being sustainable (see exploitation report).