Impact Days Webinar – 16.01.2025
Impact Filmmaking for Social Justice: Visions of Hope
Impact Days 2025 kicks off on 16th January with our annual public webinar on Impact Filmmaking for Social Justice. This year we explore the power and the challenges of promoting hopeful human rights narratives in documentaries and impact campaigns.
Lift Like A Girl from Mayye Zayed
– Angela Davis, Writer, philosophy teacher & human rights activist, FIFDH 2024
Uplifting stories of success can inspire both hope and action. But in the process of crafting these stories, filmmakers, civil society organisations and journalists alike must ask themselves tough questions:
How best to balance hopeful narratives – stories of courage and resilience, of individuals and communities rising above adversity – with the realities of systemic poverty, persecution and oppression? How to keep conveying optimism whilst truthfully portraying protagonists’ defeats? And how to avoid an oversimplification of complex issues in pursuit of a hopeful narrative?
We’ll be exploring these with filmmakers and human rights communicators through the case study and panel discussion below.
Webinar – Thursday 16th January 2025, 14:00-16:00 CET
Register here to watch and to send us your questions live
PROGRAMME
Case study with Q&A: Lift Like a Girl
Lift Like a Girl tells the story of Zebiba, an Egyptian teenage girl dreaming to become a world champion weightlifter. With the guidance of her relentless coach, she emerges from a scrappy training camp in the streets of Alexandria to compete at international level. The film’s impact campaign was in part conceived at Impact Days 2020 and has since reached a global audience through festivals, streaming platforms, mobile cinemas and on-the-ground initiatives. Director, Producer & Impact Producer Mayye Zayed talks us through the film’s international campaign and answers your questions.
Speaker:
Mayye Zayed (she/her) – Director, Producer & Impact Producer, Lift Like a Girl
Moderation:
Ana Castañosa (she/her) – Head of Impact Days
Panel discussion: communicating hope in human rights
Speakers:
Thomas Coombes (he/him) – Founder, Hope-based Comms
Adrian Kawaley-Lathan (he/him) – Executive Director, Resilient Foundation
Juan Mejia (he/him) – Director, Igualada
Moderation:
Sophie Mulphin (she/her) – Impact Days NGO Programme Manager
participants
Zayed
Egyptian filmmaker Mayye Zayed, based in Berlin, has been working as a director, producer, impact producer, editor and cinematographer since 2010. Her documentary Lift Like A Girl won Dok Leipzig’s Golden Dove Award and was the first Egyptian documentary released globally on Netflix. Her films have screened at top festivals including Berlinale, AFI Fest, Doc NYC, Toronto, Sao Paulo and Cairo.
A Fulbright scholar, she studied cinema at Wellesley College and Innovations in Documentary at MIT. She’s an alumna of Berlinale Talents, Good Pitch, MFI, Global Media Makers, Documentary Campus Masterschool and American Film Showcase. She also served on film grant and award juries for Getty Images, IDA Awards, Aflamuna, and Hot Docs.
Coombes
Thomas Coombes is a freelance communications trainer and the founder of hope-based communication, a five-shift approach anyone can use to focus their work on the change they want to see.
Thomas is on a mission to translate insights from brain science into a smart strategy for social change. He has worked in political communications for international organizations like Amnesty International, Transparency International and the European Commission.
He writes about strategies for social change on Substack and LinkedIn and is preparing a new membership platform for changemakers for launch in mid-2025. He is specialised in human rights and post-colonial history.
Kawaley-Lathan
Adrian combines his expertise in peacebuilding, social impact storytelling and multimedia communications to transform apathy into action.
He designs and directs programmes, productions and campaigns that enhance social engagement, build capacity and empower sustainable change towards positive peace and social harmony.
Adrian is the Executive Director of the Resilient Foundation, a non-profit that facilitates the funding and production of visionary storytelling that drives collective action towards a resilient world.
Mejia
Juan Mejia Botero is an award-winning film director with over 25 years of experience in feature documentaries.
His work has focused primarily on human rights abuses and struggles for social justice around the world.
He has worked extensively in Latin America, The United States and the Caribbean where he has directed and produced a number of films and documentary series on forced displacement, ethnic autonomy, race and racism, immigration, policing, state violence, and the competition for natural resources.