17 December 2016

UK hospitality offered to asylum seekers proves winning subject for Tweetapitch winner

This year’s winner of the We The Peoples Film Festival Tweetapitch competition is Mei Leng Yew. Her film using the working title The Stranger in My Home will be co-produced with Natalie Ktena and is planned to run for 25 minutes.

Mei told the jury at the Young Film Makers Day event at the BFI South bank that the film ‘follows volunteer hosts in Britain who have opened their homes and hearts to complete strangers for an unknown length of time. These guests are asylum seekers from all over the world. Some are fleeing war and persecution, and without their hosts' generosity, they would be left destitute and homeless. The film will offer insight into the lives of people from very different backgrounds and will also show how we as ordinary citizens can take action in the fact of injustice.’

Over the course of a year, the film will follow four guest-and-host pairs in London as the guests settle into their temporary homes and embark on a complicated legal process to be granted leave to remain in the UK. Once citizenship is granted, the guests will be offered social housing all over the UK, will be able to access education and apply for work. With the £500 bursary, Mei and Natalie will be able to film these important steps on the guests' journey, as they start to build their new lives and homes, at last.