​Context

Samlis Education Foundation was established in the Dandora district of Nairobi, Kenya with the collaboration between Good People Kenya and SBS Himang TV. The mobile filmmaking workshop took place between the 10th and the 21st of April, 2017.

What We Did
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The workshop’s main goal was to introduce filmmaking to a group of 22 adolescents living in one of the impoverished slums of Nairobi. Through the course of the workshop, participants were introduced to various technical skills required to produce films starting from team building and division of labor to storytelling techniques, script writing, camerawork, sound design, storyboarding and editing.

​Importantly, they were also engaged in exercises to reconsider the part media plays in their own lives and to understand various kinds of media content as texts to be critically analysed and challenged depending on the kind of content being disseminated. The intention was to empower the participants with tools to not only read films at the level of technique and craft but also in terms of the implicit message being peddled under the guise of information.

The purpose of using mobile phones instead of regular digital cameras was to increase the likelihood that the participants will engage in filmmaking since the cost of mobile phone video production is significantly lower than other forms of film production.

Result
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Through collaboration and teamwork, the participants were able to produce three short films at the end of the workshop which were then screened on the last day of the workshop for the friends, teachers, and relatives of the participants. The films were subsequently entered into the Slum Film Festival as well as the Ndizi Film Festival. Two of the films have been selected for screening in the 2017 edition of both festivals.