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These Girls Are Missing
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These Girls Are Missing is a portrait of a fundamental social issue from the inside -- with several girls and young women telling their own stories, in their own words. Focusing on core issues of the gender gap in education, the film introduces audiences to the costs and contradictions around the single most effective tool for improving health and sanitation and increasing the spread of new technologies and ideas in the developing world -- the education of girls and women.
Yet in Africa, few girls go to school and even those who begin first grade drop out in increasing numbers before graduation. Through a camera which serves as a quiet observer of the world from a young woman’s perspective, we see and understand the conflicting forces around decisions about girls’ schooling within a family as well as within the larger society.
These Girls Are Missing offers small sets of stories, sharp glimpses into a few intimate relationships layered to mirror the complex reality: Nadouba and Bintu in their West-African village; Taz and Patricia from elite St. Mary’s Secondary School in Malawi; Ethel and her mother, nearby villagers torn between their tiny farm and the modern world; a relaxed and riotous conversation among a group of Malinké elders.
Through these vivid stories, the audience grows to understand the ways that deep cultural attitudes, as much or more than economics, undermine the future of Africa’s women. More provocative than prescriptive, this film aims to inspire reflection, argument and deeper understanding.
A companion film hosted by The Honorable Aicha Bah, Minister of Education in Guinea, is called The Girls Know It (47 minutes, 1997). Both films exist in French, English, Swahili and four additional local languages - Chichewa, Susu, Malinké and Poular -- and are in wide use throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
Premiere -- 1995 United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing
Michael Camerini & Shari Robertson
Producer/Directors
The Epidavros Project, Inc.
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