Come and celebrate the power of storytelling through film, craft and textiles at the Bloc Cinema QMUL Mile End
This special event brings together felted animations produced by Jessica Jacobs AHRC-funded Storytelling for All project alongside an exhibition that reveals how the stories of life and work were crafted in felt.
The evening includes a lively panel discussion featuring Sinai Stories collaborators, exploring how combining textiles with filmmaking can carry stories of labour, heritage and identity.
Storytelling for All (2023-5) is a community-led research project providing heritage focused filmmaking workshops to Bedouin communities in the South Sinai, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, led by Dr Jessica Jacobs (Queen Mary University of London) in partnership with Selema Gabaly (Fansina Sinai Bedouin Handicrafts St Catherine's), Said Khedr and Tanis Newman (Desert Divers, Dahab), UK artists Emily O’Mara and Andrea Morreau, and film director/editor Vitor Hugo Costa (Metafilmes). The films were created by different communities of Bedouin women from Dahab and St Catherine’s in Sinai, Egypt during storytelling and animation workshops. The films aim to highlight the value of the cultural heritage held within textiles and embroidery and traditional knowledge as a sustainable practice for climate change mitigation, and emphasize the vital role of matrilineal intergenerational knowledge transfer in keeping this knowledge alive. Each film offers a different story of a unique place, told by the people who live there.
