In preparation of Hamwe Festival 2022, The University of Global Health Equity (UGHE) started its second support to film production. The Hamwe Festival has been created to foster strong collaborations between the creative industries and the health sector to generate new solutions and analyses to today’s global health challenges. 

The first UGHE’s support to film production project took place in 2021. It collaborated with an international digital project, “Visualizing the virus”, an interactive platform that highlights and investigates the diverse ways coronavirus is imagined and the inequities it makes visible. Four short films by Rwandan filmmakers documenting experiences of the pandemic were produced through this project where the university supported filmmakers and facilitated their collaboration with global health researchers.

For its fourth edition, which will take place from November 9th to November 13th, 2022, Hamwe Festival will propose a reflection on the responsibilities that emerge once we create, manage, and preserve heritage as it constructs memory, includes or exclude in collective narratives and consequently affect individuals and communities’ mental health today and in the future. This topic will be investigated through exhibitions, performances, a writing competition, as well as exchange with creatives, researchers, and museum professionals. UGHE will again collaborate with filmmakers and support the creation of fictional or non-fictional short films that contributes to this reflection.

“Healing through the archive” is a powerful premise. It suggests that archives are not static or latent materials but potent spaces holding in themselves the power to transform the present as well as what is needed for individuals and communities to achieve wellbeing or become healthy again. With this project, UGHE will invite two Rwandan filmmakers to reflect on the therapeutical potential held in archives and on the responsibility that consequently falls on the archivist. According to the questions they chose to analyze, the selected artists will be provided access to historical archives in Germany, Belgium, France, and Rwanda to collaborate with historians, mental health and museum professionals across countries.

This project will give its stakeholders, including the audience, the opportunity to explore pressing contemporary topics amongst which the necessity of archiving, archiving methods and their bias, the access and value given to archival materials, as well as archival silences and absences.

At the term of the project in November 2022, each selected filmmaker will have produced 15-to-25-minute films that will premiere during Hamwe Festival.

Applications will be open on UGHE’s website from February 11th until March 15th. An information session on the project will be organized on March 1st (to be announced on social media).

To apply, candidates must submit: 

• A completed application form: link 
• The applicant filmmaker biography
• The proposed production team members’ profiles
• A project treatment detailing the questions the applicant wishes to analyze
• A line-item budget that does not exceed 5000USD inclusive of taxes for the film production. UGHE and its partners will support the selected filmmakers’ travels abroad hence they should not be included in the budget.

Apply Here

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If you have any questions throughout the process, please contact hamwe@157.245.250.106