The ALIRP Education Committee held a virtual event on July 14, 2020 from 6-7:30pm in celebration of World Refugee Day, which is June 20.  Co-sponsors for this event included the Community Supported Films Project, the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice, the Birmingham Islamic Society, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham Institute for Human Rights and Sparkman Center for Global Health. The event featured three 10-minute documentary films produced by immigrants through the New Immigrant and Refugee Visions (NIRV) project. This project is a collection of documentary films by and about immigrants produced by the Community Supported Film project. We showed three of these films, followed by a discussion with the filmmakers.

The three films are:

1. Campaign for a New American by Quin Li of China.  An Indian immigrant's daughter campaigns to be elected as the first woman of color to the city council of a working class town that has always been a magnet for immigrants
2. She’s an American Child by Rafael DeLeon of the Dominican Republic. Portrays the challenges faced by a young DACA recipient and her mother who is undocumented.
3. Navigating Hope by Sayed Najib Hashimi of Afghanistan. Portrays experiences of a family who escaped to a refugee camp in Nepal  from Buddhist Bhutan where they were being persecuted as Christians, and are now navigating the challenges of life in America.

 
Watch a recording of the event here.  Listen to excerpts from the discussion following the films here. ​