FilmAid

FilmAid’s Director Gita Saedi Kiely embodies the organization’s mission to give a public voice to vulnerable communities around the world through the power of film, and to “democratize who gets to tell their story”. She grew up in Chicago in a small Persian-American community with parents from Teheran who met in the USA as university students in the 1960s.

Over the past 18 years, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has donated over $1. 375 million to the non-profit organization, FilmAid.

What do Joseph Lopir, a student of FilmAid´s Media Training Program at the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya; Abdiqathar Keinan, of the Media Training Program at Dadaab Refugee Camp; and Lismari Machado, a member of the Communication Network that serves the Wayuu Community, the largest indigenous community in Colombia, have in common? They share the passion and willingness to tell stories that reflect the reality of their own communities. FilmAid is a non-profit organization founded by film producer Caroline Baron in 2001 with the mission of empowering refugee communities to strengthen their ability to access high-quality, lifesaving information, as well as advocate for themselves through filmmaking and visual storytelling.

HFPA Grantee Imagine a huge screen reaching far into the African night sky. A Hollywood movie is being shown.