Kenyan producer Samuel Ekomol was awarded a CHF 10,000 StoryBoard Collective grant 11 March at FIFDH to help fund community screenings of Between the Rains, directed by Moses Thuranira Thiane and Andrew H Brown. Filmed during a period of prolonged drought, the film tells the story of a conflicted young shepherd who questions his own identity as a warrior while observing the erosion of the culture that has thus far shaped every aspect of his life.
The film was a double-winner at Tribeca FF 2023, picking up Best Documentary and Best Cinematography (Documentary) awards.
“We feel that the award that we have received is going to impact the targeted communities in a positive way,” Ekomol told Business Doc Europe. “It is also going to impose some questions on them, on how to rethink better their lives. We believe that this award, through the presentation of the community screenings, will shape the community’s understanding of themselves and that they will be able to change their narrative. By engaging the local stakeholders, by following the local dynamics. we believe that the communities will be able to harmonize themselves, will be able to embrace the new changes and will be able to embrace digitalization.”
StoryBoard Collective invited submissions from film projects to apply for the CHF 10,000 grant that would go towards a programme of community screenings, presented together with the South Africa-based solar-powered initiative Sunshine Cinema.
“We support organizations that do impact and we support individual impact campaigns,” explained StoryBoard Collective Impact Fund Officer Patricia Finneran. “We’re also excited about partnering with other organizations to leverage our support to make impact projects go further.”
“This year we partnered again with FIFDH Impact Days, who we’ve been working with for a long time, and we wanted to see about addressing opportunities in community screenings, particularly on the continent of Africa,” Finneran continues. “We knew about, and had worked, with Sunshine Cinema, which does two amazing things. They have a Sun Box, which is a solar powered mobile cinema…They also have a whole program to train facilitators to do community screenings, which is quite an intense thing, as they do it in remote villages.”
“Samuel is also local,” Finneran confirms of Kenyan producer Ekomol. “He grew up 200 meters from the main character in the film, and he already knows how to do community screenings, but this will be advancing on his work.”
“The big story is that we always focus on distribution in terms of what’s happening with Netflix and Amazon – and it still matters that films get onto a platform to be seen broadly,” she adds. “But for a lot of these films, to bring them to the communities where they were made and to bring them in a way that’s beautiful and a shared experience is really magical. As we say, impact is always local to begin with.”
For producer Ekomol it is essential not only that the local communities get to see the film, but also for its reach to be extended as widely as possible. “These communities have their own unique traditional cultures, their native cultures, with their lands being supportive for their livestock. We sat down and felt that this community will lose their culture completely because of the factors like government policies and climate change that are resulting in drought and starvation. There is need for the whole globe to know this story and bring ideas together, to reason together, and [work out] how we can elevate these people.”
