Call for participation in a short film making competition on ‘Gender Equality’

Background: Gender has been a cross cutting issue for the European Union in all of its development cooperation interventions globally and in Nepal. While there has been some uneven progress in addressing girls’ and women’s rights, not a single country, around the world, is on track to empower girls and achieve gender equality by 2030. To make matters worse the COVID situation around the world has been affecting the girls and women the most. This is because a large number of them work in the informal sector. Gender violence is reportedly on the rise after the onslaught of the COVID pandemic in Nepal and there is a glaring need to raise awareness against gender violence and at the same time show solidarity with the ongoing movement to advocate and establish gender rights at all levels of the Nepali society.

To address this, the EU’s new Action Plan on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in External Action 2021–2025 (GAP III) aims to accelerate progress on empowering women and girls, and safeguard gains made on gender equality during the 25 years since the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and its Platform for Action. The EU along with the Nepal Government and UNFPA have been implementing a project to fight gender-based violence in the Karnali Province of Nepal. In keeping with the above EU policies and EU engagement in Nepal, the organization of a short film competition on ‘Gender Equality’ would complement the ongoing efforts by EU Delegation to Nepal to raise awareness on gender issues and sensitize people to understand the importance of gender equality for a balanced development of the country.

Theme of the Competition: The short film competition is being organized as a side event of the tenth edition of the Nepal-EU Virtual Film Festival (17 Sept to 25 Sept). The films should be in one way or the other linked to issues related to gender for instance: the impacts of gender discrimination; advantages of promoting gender equality, situation of gender equality in Nepal; how gender mainstreaming helps to spur development etc. The scope mentioned here, however, is not necessarily limited to the three or four criteria mentioned for the theme; the scope encompassed by the short films could be wide enough to include other issues of genders as well

Requirements for the films:The filmmakers (director) should be Nepali nationals.

• The length of the films should be 40 minutes or less.
• The films should have been made on or after 2018. Films made before that date will not be eligible.
• The films should have subtitles in English if the language originally used in the film is other than English. If the language originally used in the film is English, then the film should have Nepali subtitles.