HOME is celebrating Refugee Week this week with a programme brimming with world-class theatre, film, art and performance.
The culture-centre’s inaugural festival of art showcases the work of refugee artists based in Manchester, as well as those further afield.
It hopes to raise awareness, challenge stereotypes and bring the communities of our city together as well as offering Manchester’s culture seekers a moving and eye-opening alternative to the usual big-screen features.
The festival kicked off tonight with Through Our Eyes, a film from BAFTA-award winning director Samir Mehanovic, a Muslim refugee from the tragic Bosnian Wars of the 1990s.
The film projects Mehanovic’s personal experience to give a fresh insight into the Syrian conflict, focussing on the human catastrophe of it.
LIVES AND TIMES: BAFTA-award winning director Samir Mehanovic takes us on a 70-minute journey in Through Our Eyes to bring fresh insight into the Syrian crisis
The 70-minute documentary was shot over three years, and follows the lives of Syrian refugee families, and allows us to experience the conflict and movement of people through their own eyes.
Following this, other top picks from the films being showed, include the much-celebrated Human Flow from radical Chinese artist Ai WeiWei, as well as The Workers Cup, a film by Human Rights Watch following a group of labourers from the 2022 World Cup stadium construction sites.
In events, highlights include an open conversation with campaigner Tony Openshaw, the These Walls Must Fall campaign, artist-filmmaker Kooj Chuhan, interspersed with live poetry and spoken word from Sai Murray.
Complemented with This Is Who I Am, a production in partnership with Manchester Amnesty International presents the verbal stories of refugees focuses on the specific challenges that LGBT people face as they move through the UK asylum process, the events contribute a powerful reflection on migration as we remain at a crossroads in humanity.
