Por: randa, Enviado: Apr 29 09

Regions: Egypt

Tags: egypt, fellowship, freedom house, WITNESS

I’m Randa Abo Eldahab, and I am spending the next month at WITNESS on a Freedom House Fellowship.   I’m from Cairo, Egypt, where I work for an organization that supports civil society organizations to use technology better in support of human rights.  I’ve worked as a journalist and researcher, and as a volunteer in Italy working with asylum seekers, refugees, women surviving armed conflict, street children, sex workers and illegal immigrants.

So why did I decide to come to WITNESS on this Fellowship?  

Film and video are powerful tools for advocating for human rights issues, but they are also a way of raising people’s awareness of their own rights and freedoms.  I believe in using film and video to defend human rights, and as a trained filmmaker, I believe that visual media, especially in a place like Egypt, has much more influence and impact than the written word – that’s why I have come to WITNESS.   

Learning from the staff at WITNESS will be important for me in developing new ways to talk to audiences about human rights issues in my films.  (Soon I will post some of the films I have shot and edited online.)  I hope to take some of that learning back to Egypt with me to help my friends and colleagues working in the media to understand human rights approaches to making film and video.

I also have my own blog where I write on different political and economical issues that concern me, such as workers’ rights, disability rights, women’s rights and even calling for national strikes!  Over the next month, I will be writing about video and human rights in Egypt, and I will guest-edit the front page of the Hub for one week – selecting videos from an Egyptian perspective.  I am looking forward to sharing my perspectives on human rights, video and the internet with you over the next month.