Empowering Scotland's Ethnic and Cultural Minority Communities
After 2016’s inaugural success, the BEMIS Burns Night is back, celebrating Rabbie’s iconically internationalist outlook and egalitarian spirit. Echoing Celtic Connections’ 2017 emphasis on female musicians, and women’s central role within cultural traditions, tonight’s programme is very much after the lasses’ fashion – a focus of which Burns would doubtless wholeheartedly approve.
'Chasing Asylum' - Chasing Asylum exposes the real impact of Australia's offshore detention policies and explores how ‘The Lucky Country' became a country where leaders choose detention over compassion and governments deprive the desperate of their basic human rights.
The film features never before seen footage from inside Australia's offshore detention camps, revealing the personal impact of sending those in search of a safe home to languish in limbo.
Chasing Asylum explores the mental, physical and fiscal consequences of Australia's decision to lock away families in unsanitary conditions hidden from media scrutiny, destroying their lives under the pretext of saving them.
'The Babushkas of Chernobyl' - In the radioactive Dead Zone surrounding Chernobyl's Reactor No. 4, a defiant community of women scratches out an existence on some of the most toxic land on Earth. They share this hauntingly beautiful but lethal landscape with an assortment of visitors – scientists, soldiers, and even ‘stalkers' – young thrill-seekers who sneak in to pursue post-apocalyptic video game-inspired fantasies. Why the women chose to return after the disaster – defying the authorities and endangering their health – is a remarkable tale about the pull of home, the healing power of shaping one's destiny, and the subjective nature of risk.
'A World Not Ours' is an intimate, humorous, portrait of three generations of exile in the refugee camp of Ein el-Helweh, in southern Lebanon. Based on a wealth of personal recordings, family archives, and historical footage, the film is a sensitive, and illuminating study of belonging, friendship, and family.
'I came from the unknown to sing' - Ghazi Hussein is an award winning Palestinian poet and writer living in Scotland. This short film explores his poetry as the narrative thread to unravel the complex emotional journey he has traveled through and how he came to eventually call Edinburgh home.
Our shared equalities and human rights hustings will offer an opportunity for our collective members and others to consider the manifesto commitments of the political parties within the context of prevailing equality and human rights issues.
'Welcome to Refugeestan' - This film focuses on the way the UNHCR manages camps that shelter more than 16 million refugees all around the world, creating a virtual country as large as the Netherlands.
How does the UNHCR run these camps and train its representatives? How can they deal with the urgent needs of thousands of new refugees that arrive each day? How has this emergency response turned into a durable situation with an average stay of over fifteen years? What are the long-term perspectives for this kind of response to humanitarian urgency?
Shot all around the world – Kenya, Tanzania, Jordan, the border of Greece/Macedonia – and in the UNHCR offices.
Launch of the 2017/2018 GRAMNet/BEMIS Film Series, showing 'Constance on the Edge'.
A new edited collection about Scotland’s Muslim communities has recently been published by Edinburgh University Press. One of the first collections of essays about Scottish Muslims, chapters focus on issues as diverse as health, education, gender, sexuality, politics, integration, family and the media. Contributions also focus on political participation, multicultural nationalism as well as citizenship practices and integration strategies.
You are invited to a launch of this collection where there will be a chance to hear from and meet with a number of the contributors.
Wallah - Je tu jure tells the stories of men and women travelling along West African migration routes to Italy. Senegal's rural villages, Niger's bus stations and "ghettos" full of traffickers, Italian squares and houses the the backdrops of these courageous trips, which often end in tragedy.
With special guest Professor Tom Devine Part of the ‘Scotland’s Diverse History’ Series. Minority Community considerations and discussions celebrating Scotland’s 2017 Year of History, Heritage and Archaeology. This lecture will be based on as-yet-unpublished research on ten immigrant groups who have settled in Scotland over the last fifty years or so. It will consider such […]
Additional funding from Sky, being delivered by Corra
