Name of the project: Participatory Video Training in the Old City of Hebron
Period of the project: April 2006 – October 2006
Funded by: Friedrich Naumann Foundation and DED and the Global Fund for Women

This project aimed to contribute to improve the situation of Palestinian women living with depression and disempowerment. The project wanted to portrait and disseminates examples of women who are able to cope with problems they face as women and as citizens. This is important since media in Palestine fails to reflect the deterioration of the situation of women; there is a lack of representation and visibility of positive women role models within the Palestinian local media.

By implementing the project, TAM focused on young women from the specific area of Hebron, since the situation there is very critical on political, social and economical levels: Hebron is characterized by a particularly traditional and conservative culture. Since 2000, it was more affected by isolation and economical depression than most other areas in the West Bank: Hebron is a besieged city and regularly subjected to curfews and Israeli army incursions. Inhabitants suffer from daily pressure from Israeli settlers who live in mixed surroundings.

Marginalization and discrimination towards women and especially young women is also getting worse causing an increase in early marriages, deprived access to high education, domestic violence, over-burdening of women with household responsibilities.

Therefore, the population and especially women need to be given a chance to become more aware of their needs and rights and to be given tools to express themselves in front of a wider audience.

The project sake to give eighteen young Palestinian women from Hebron skills to be better heard through media, by training them in film-making through participatory video.

Participatory Video (PV) is a tool for individual and group empowerment, a tool to develop creativity and to express feelings, experience and opinion.

The beneficiaries received more than 50 hours of training on communication, women rights, camera techniques, research, documentary, interview, filming, directing, and editing.

The 18 women used this tool for empowerment by producing from A to Z one short movie that was broadcasted on local televisions in all West Bank. It will also be sent to yearly youth and women film festivals in Europe, in order to send alternative voices of Palestinian young women abroad.

The documentary is dealing with polygamy, in the area of Hebron in specific. The topic was chosen by the participants themselves who felt the importance of raising this issue and creating awareness about the impacts of this phenomenon.

This short movie gave to the young women an opportunity and a concrete means to express themselves and feel more confident in life. Indirect positive effects were the contribution to change perceptions of women by presenting a phenomenon that affects the women in particular and the local community in general. This movie was screened in series of events in which the participants shared during debates their experience with a broader public audience. Therefore, the documentary contributed to change the way media is considering gender and human rights issues and generated debates about human rights and gender equality by communicating young women’s gender concerns to Palestinian adult society.

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