Youth Heritage - Projecting Identities

Projecting Identities is an innovative project bringing together young people, Somali heritage, digital filmmaking, and the film archive.  Our project provides an opportunity or young people from the British Somali community to explore and preserve on film their heritage and convergence of British Somali culture and traditions in the context of their lived experiences, while questioning the role of identity in the diverse city of Leicester. 

The participants are drawn from Project Our Generation (Project OG), a group of highly committed and socially conscious young people who meet weekly at SDS and who want to make a difference to the lives of young individuals in their community. The young people live with multiple identities and labels which others often attribute to them. Most have grown up in the UK or have migrated here from other European countries. Commonly, their parents left Somalia during the civil war. 

This Project, managed by SDS, will partner with the accredited regional film archive for the Midlands, MACE, to produce and preserve heritage films made using smartphone technology; to deliver a series of community heritage screening events that will engage wider audiences; and create archive resources supporting the long-term preservation of born-digital material.