ABOUT FILMMAKER-IN-RESIDENCE / I WAS HERE

HAND-HELD stems from the I WAS HERE participatory media workshops at the National Film Board of Canada’s
Filmmaker-in-Residence project at St. Michael’s Hospital. 

I WAS HERE places digital cameras, photoblog websites and video cameras into the hands of 6 young women who are pregnant and/or parenting and have had experience with homelessness. The I WAS HERE artists document the world through their own pictures and stories. The artists’ work was recently mounted as a photo exhibit, and captured the attention of policy-makers, politicians, healthcare and social service providers and the general public.

The Filmmaker-in-Residence project find its virtual home on the web, in an immersive online documentary www.nfb.ca/filmmakerinresidence, winner of numerous new media awards, including the Canadian New Media Award for news and Information, and the Flash Forward Award for Narrative.

Collaborative and community-based, the initiative places media creation into the hands of citizens and agents of true social action. In this pilot project, documentary-maker Katerina Cizek is Filmmaker-in-Residence at St. Michael’s Hospital, working with partners at the frontlines: doctors, nurses, researchers and patients.

From local projects at the Inner City Health Unit, to global ones, Filmmaker-in-Residence is partnering media with medicine in innovative ways. Inspired by the legendary Challenge for Change Program of the 1960’s, and fueled by the digital revolution, Cizek experiments with form and content, using many forms of media and documentary - film, photography, the world wide web - to create participatory, community-based projects. And tell good stories, too.

www.nfb.ca/filmmakerinresidence