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Cultural Gender Roles Present Challenges, Helpful Reminders

A group of women from Somalia outside a Columbus apartment building.

A group of women from Somalia outside a Columbus apartment building.

Cindy Gailard
Columbus Neighborhoods: New Americans producer

In certain ethnic populations, men and women do not mingle socially, or if they do, it is a very limited interaction.

Muslims especially are modest people and while we all recognize that women wear headscarves, we pay little attention to men who dress moderately and rarely, if ever, look women in the eye.

As a filmmaker, I need for people to look me in the eye. While they are being filmed, it’s imperative that my subject’s eye line remains steady.

If not, my audience becomes uncomfortable because the subject looks shifty and unreliable when they are not. So, getting men in these refugee populations to look at me, a female filmmaker, was a challenge.

At first I switched roles with my videographer, who is male. That worked sometimes. On shoots where I had no videographer I tried wearing a scarf around my neck so that they had somewhere perhaps familiar to look during the experience. That too helped.

Mgaba Nodjitan from Chad is interviewed for Columbus Neighborhoods: New Americans.

Mgaba Nodjitan from Chad is interviewed for Columbus Neighborhoods: New Americans.

The best tactic though was when I averted my gaze and gave them room to look wherever they needed to. I looked at their hands while they talked. They began to relax. They opened up. They caught my eye just enough to appear calm on camera and then their stories began to unfold.

And over the year I began to reconnect with some long forgotten feelings of my own – feelings that I encountered when I first started making films.

How unnerving it must be to be singled out and asked to be interviewed. How disconcerting the lights and cameras can be to someone not accustomed to the intrusion. How much I take our media rich society for granted because it provides me with subjects who already have the skills to perform on camera.

I am grateful to have made this film for it reminded me to slow down and take into consideration those folks who need a little more time to tell their stories.