Nostalgia and Belonging
Amplifying Migrant Voices through Participatory Filmmaking
Project overview
Nostalgia and Belonging is a participatory filmmaking project exploring how migration, memory and belonging can be understood through creative self-representation.
Working with refugee communities in Northern Greece, the project supports participants in creating short personal films using mobile phones, focusing on everyday life, personal memory and the ongoing process of creating a sense of home.
Funded through the University of Essex International Impact Fund 2025–26, the project extends research on nostalgia and displacement into a collaborative public engagement context, transforming scholarly inquiry into creative and social impact.
Why this project matters
Public discussions about migration often focus on crisis, trauma or border crossings, while the lived experiences of refugees themselves are frequently simplified or unheard. This project responds to that gap by creating space for participants to represent their own experiences in their own terms.
Rather than focusing on trauma, the project explores quieter but equally important questions: How is belonging created in unfamiliar places? How does memory shape everyday life? What does “home” mean in conditions of displacement?
The project also seeks to develop an ethical and replicable model of participatory filmmaking that can be useful to cultural organisations and NGOs working with refugee communities.
What the project does
The project consists of a series of filmmaking workshops taking place in spring 2026 in Kavala, Northern Greece, in collaboration with Northern Lights Aid.
Participants are supported in creating short personal films using their mobile phones. Through the workshops they explore simple approaches to storytelling, filming and visual expression, developing films that reflect their own ideas, memories and everyday realities.
The workshops are followed by a collaborative editing process and a public screening of the completed films in Kavala in summer 2026.
Selected outputs will also be shared through further public engagement activity, including dissemination through research and cultural networks.
Project partners
The project is delivered in collaboration with Northern Lights Aid (NLA), a grassroots NGO based in Kavala, Greece, supporting displaced communities and vulnerable local residents through long-term, community-based initiatives. NLA’s work combines material support, community engagement and social inclusion through projects such as its Community Centre, Free Clothing Store, Community Garden and support programmes for vulnerable families. Located within walking distance of the Perigiali camp in Kavala, NLA has developed a strong local presence and a model of sustained, community-oriented support that makes it an ideal partner for this project.
The project builds on this collaboration by integrating participatory filmmaking into a setting already committed to dignity, creativity and community-building.
Research and impact
The project builds on Tasos Giapoutzis’s research and filmmaking practice on nostalgia, displacement and migration, including the feature documentary Quiet Life (2019), the ongoing docufiction project Mnemonic Muse, and the open access monograph Nostalgia and Displacement in Contemporary European Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026). Together, these works explore how cinema can engage questions of memory, migration and belonging, and this project extends that research into a participatory and socially engaged context.
Its impact lies in supporting participants to reclaim authorship of their own narratives, while also generating a participatory filmmaking model that may be adapted by partner organisations in future work. The project contributes to wider conversations about ethical cultural representation, migration, and socially engaged film practice, while turning research into collaborative public impact.
The first stages of the Nostalgia and Belonging project began in Greece in April 2026 with participants joining in with a workshop series. During the four workshops participants were introduced to filmmaking techniques, provided with basic equipment such as microphones, and encouraged to experiment with different techniques.
