Langston Hughes African American Film Festival 2008

Gilda Sheppard's documentary film "Women Together as One" was the first ever short film selected for showing by Fest Afrique 360 at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival in France. "Women Together as One" focuses on work Sheppard did with Liberian women refugees who live at the Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana, West Africa. She worked with the women to organize a women’s collective and design classes for economic sustainability (computer literacy, adult literacy, cosmetology, catering, sewing and tie and dye workshops) and school scholarships for their children. In this piece we see the women, strong and powerful, full of laughter and life, breaking media "victim" stereotypes at the rate of 30 frames per second. The women give horrid testimonies of rape and war however break the frame through their active "fighting against poverty" for their reentry into society after the trauma of war. Gilda Sheppard is a member of the faculty at The Evergreen State College Tacoma Program where she teaches sociology, media literacy and cultural studies courses. She is also a filmmaker whose documentary films have been screened in Berlin Germany, Ghana West Africa, throughout USA and recently at eh Fest Afrique 360 at the Cannes Film Festival in France, Sheppard will speak to the growing population of refugees using her work in the Buduburam camp and provide stories of her one woman camera documentation of this process.