Making it Home

‘Making it Home’, a Creative Scotland-funded series of poetry reading and film-making workshops with 10 asylum seeker and refugee women in Glasgow and 7 local women in Edinburgh, has contributed to widening access of disenfranchised groups to cultural resources in Scotland and to the political process. Its success in raising public understanding of the issues facing asylum seekers, via the production of a series of short films and booklet of poems, was cited with approval in the Scottish Parliament. ‘Making it Home’ also led to new working partnerships between third sector organisations, who have been furnished with creative resources by which to fulfil their aims.

The project ran in two halves: first, between October and December 2012 both groups met separately with professional poets to read and discuss five poems concerned with home. Building on these experiences, each group divided into two teams (four in total) of film-makers, and between January and June 2013 took part in a series of 7 film-making workshops with the Glasgow Media Co-op, culminating in each team producing a short film based on one of the poems studied in the first set of workshops. In each case, the films were devised and produced entirely by the women, with only the minimum of input from Media Co-op. The films were screened at various venues in both cities during Refugee Week (17-23 June) 2013.