Filmmaker Statement

I was given the opportunity to work on a collaborative project from FilmAid Kenya and the University of Pennsylvania at Kakuma, a refugee camp in Kenya. After finishing my first year of film school the idea of collaborating on a documentary with refugees from all over East Africa filled me with a profound sense of purpose. I was excited to share all that I had learned so far about documentary filmmaking. But I knew this project would be the most challenging one that I had ever worked on, and I wasn’t wrong. I was completely outside of my comfort zone in all aspects imaginable. But once I met Sadia, a refugee from Sudan, the protagonist of our film, I realized that I understood her story and journey beyond what I had imagined. Like Sadia and her family, my own family also had to immigrate as refugees because of a genocide. My grandparents fled Europe and North Africa during the Holocaust and arrived in Mexico as refugees. The circumstances between Sadia’s journey and that of my family