Artistic expressions have the power to spark emotions and provoke thoughts, leading to profound changes in individuals and society. This crucial aspect plays a significant role in shaping our understanding of the world around us and can be seen as the motivation why artists have special protection in the Human rights declarations.
One of the strategic discourses given much attention by our partners relates to this significant role of the arts and storytellers, in shaping our understanding of the world around us. In contemporary terminology this understanding is defined as the narratives we relate to. For our partners the possible shaping of changes in these narratives is a primary motivation for their work, according to a survey Mimeta did among partners in 2022. They see these narratives as potential tools for social and political change. However, if new stories are strengthening certain narratives and these are systematically worked on in terms of impact-oriented outreach and social involvement, as these following statements exemplifies:
a) There is a complex narrative related to the political defeat and its economic and social consequences in Syria and the Arab region. This narrative reinforces the idea that it is impossible to change our reality and that artistic, creative and civil actions are futile. The circumstances on the ground fuel this narrative, especially at a time when the world’s attention is drawn to other international issues. Amid this reality, our organization and other peer organizations are working hard to combat this narrative by offering an alternative vision that highlights the region’s experience in coping with crises and the role of art in countering the widespread frustration and imagining and building a better future.
b) By supporting innovative methods of storytelling, across multiple artistic and creative practices, we open them up to wider interaction with the public. We aim on using the power of storytelling to strengthen communities and impact narrative change, at the same time affect change within the communities of culture and art practitioners through questioning the practices themselves.
c) Our organization has been working for years developing contextual projects, with the direct implication of local communities and experts from different fields, in order to have a concrete and wider impact. In all its activities, we initiate new interactions and creates spaces for discourse. Through partnerships with local, regional, and international partners, our organization brings together different community actors (both online and in-person) to mobilize civil society, stimulate critical thinking and debate, and generate knowledge. That way, we participate in writing new narratives with the concerned people and territories.
From the survey we can read that our partners see that these narratives, the stories produced and, not least, socially distributed, are a core element in their notion on how changes appear in society. There is a very high degree of agreeing in that providing narrative change is in the core of their work and there is a very strong agreement on the potential social change that may happen from developing narratives. However, the scalability of these new narratives beyond their local and professional communities, seems challenging, even if there is a very strong cooperation with other groups working for social change.
Policy dialogue versus change strategy
By capitalizing on the power of creative storytelling to sustain a space for free speech, critical thought and imagination, our partners have always been about building narratives for change. By decentralizing access to culture for major city hubs, to marginalized areas and communities, our partners have been about shifting the power dynamics around creative expression, addressing the crucial question of: who tells the story? Who has access to tools and resource to tell it? Which story and to what audience?
Action for Hope, that works with distressed refugee communities, have equipped young people from these communities with the creative tools to their own story of oppression, discrimination and displacement. It has uplifted tens of these young refugees from a destiny of exploitation from work in potatoes fields in the Lebanese Beqaa, to narrators of their own exploitation to audiences in the Beirut and other policy influencing hubs.
Aflamuna is focusing all its efforts on one overarching goal: Narrative Shift Strategy - putting Arab independent film at the service of social, environmental, political, and cultural movements, affecting change in the region and beyond. To build a Narrative Shift Ecosystem in the Arab world, Aflamuna has put together an ambitious and complementary series of initiatives, including the above-described Impact Fellowship, Impact Labs, as well as online resources on Daleel.film for funding, civil society organisation partnership and environmentally friendly filmmaking. Through the unparalleled power of cinema, Aflamuna elevated major contemporary issues as diverse as the climate emergency and forefront rural communities, gender, identity, and sexuality, the plight of workers, mental health and rehabilitation in prison, and cultural transformations in conflict.
Impact Campaigns have to tackle complex contemporary issues, setting out to affect the lived realities of often disenfranchised communities, and their actual effect can take years to materialize and adequately assess.
“Album” (Good Pitch بالعربي, Aflamuna Impact Fund ), is a film by Omar Gabriel, and an Impact Campaign by Gabriel and Cyril Bassil. “Album” follows the lives of three queer individuals and their varying relationships with their mothers. The journey to create an Impact Campaign for the film began when Omar applied to Beirut DCs program Good Pitch بالعربي, through which he met Cyril Bassil, who became the producer of the film and the Impact Producer of the campaign. Aiming to contribute to changing the lived realities of queer individuals in Lebanon and the region, especially in relation to parental and family acceptance, the campaign developed two main activities.
The first was an innovative and informal screening series called “Mom 2 Mom”. In partnership with leading local LGBTQI+ organizations Helem and Mosaic, the Album team recruited mothers of queer children who had a positive and accepting relationship with them to host screenings of the film in their homes for 3 to 5 other mothers who struggled with their relationship to their LGBTQI+ children. The film enabled them to start off a conversation amongst themselves, without any third-party present, in a safe environment where they felt understood. The first iteration of the series included 7 screenings attended by a total of 35 moms. The feedback the team received from the mothers was overwhelmingly positive, and an immediate outcome of the screenings was a record registration rate from the participating mothers in Helem’s family support program, which they had always struggled to enrol parents in. This has led the film team and their CSO partners to start planning for future iterations of the series and even consider a “Dad 2 Dad” version.
To take their message to a larger audience, and in the wake of the pandemic, the team also developed “A Letter to Myself”, a series of short documentaries released online in which seven individuals from the LGBTQ+ were given the space to speak freely and openly about their experience of life on the margins of Lebanese society. Of the experience, Gabriel said, “I felt a need to tell the truth, our truth. I wanted to say something without fear, tell our stories without fear. Say things as they are, with a lot of vulnerability and a lot of strength.” and Bassil added “Each person in these videos spoke about me and for me. They raise a voice that is erased from the public sphere. Making these videos and putting them out there was almost an existential choice for us.” The 7 episodes were released in September, accumulating a total of 1,000,000 views across different platforms. They have been screened in events in Lebanon and Europe and have been covered by prominent local and international media outlets, including L’Orient le Jour, Vice Arabia, TV5 Monde, and France Inter. An outpour of support and positive reception ensued, flooding the film team’s inboxes. A viewer proclaimed, “I do not support this lifestyle, but this treatment needs to stop, and these people should be left alone.”, and a mother came forward with a message of thanks, saying, “It had been a year since I last spoke to my son and daughter, but yesterday we watched the video together.”
From the idea to the realization of the campaign, Lebanon was hit by an economic and governmental collapse, witnessed the largest uprisings in its history, was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and was shaken by the tragic explosion of August 4th. Throughout all of that, the film team says that what kept them going was being in the company of the right partners, who were aligned in values and visions, who could offer support, but also treat the project with the care and patience that it needed. The video series also came out against the backdrop of a wave of homophobia that overtook the country, with fundamentalist groups threatening the safety of the community, the general security unconstitutionally banning “gatherings that promote homosexuality,” and a wave of police violence that continues to this day - making the campaign as courageous and necessary as ever.
Summary on policy dialogue versus change strategies:
This discussion and focus on impact from storytelling and narrative change is particularly timely given the current closure to access to public interventions for policy change in the regions our partners work in. Our program “Exploring Narrative Impact” has enabled us to capture all these efforts more intentionally, as well as support specific organizations that are developing innovative models to ensure social impact from narrative change.
