Last Chance To Apply For £20,000 REAL WORLD Award

June 5 is the last chance to apply for the £20,000 Real World award to create a 20-minute short documentary film, along with a three-minute and a 30-second film.
The award will be given to an innovative documentary filmmaker from the Screen South region (the South East of England) to make a film aimed at a global audience and based on the themes of rights, power and change in women's and men's lives.
The award is sponsored by Screen South and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS).
Real World is a unique collaboration between ids' Pathways of Women's Empowerment research programme and Screen South.
The project will support the talent and skills of the region's new and existing filmmaking talent, to influence the next generation of documentary filmmakers and give them access to new research that explores what it is that brings about positive social change in favour of greater equality and justice for all.
This is the second year the competition has run. Last year's winners produced two films that dealt with women's lives in Brazil and Palestine. Paulino Tervo, one of last year's winners, said: "The project was a very positive experience.
The funding made a real different to my work because it enabled me to do more research prior to filming and to work with a professional crew.
"I've never been happy with mainstream media images of Muslim women, or women in developing countries in general. The project really challenged some of my preconceptions about Islamic women. I learnt more about the ways in which women negotiate in their everyday lives in extremely difficult circumstances and I also learnt that empowerment can mean very different things to women in Palestine compared to women in the Western world."
Andrea Cornwall, IDS Research Fellow and Director of the Pathways of Women's Empowerment research consortium, said: "I'm really excited about the potential of this subject. The media plays a huge role in how people think about international development and about issues of rights, power and justice. Tapping into the power of the media enables us to communicate with audiences that our research might never reach - in ways that are much more exciting and engaging than those we would normally use."
Guidelines and application forms are available from the Screen South (www.screensouth.org) and IDS (www.ids.ac.uk) websites. An initial shortlist of applicants will go through to interview and the final filmmaker will be selected in September 2008. Real World will be executive produced by Screen South and IDS.
(KMcA/BMcC)