Owning the narrative

For decades, narratives about the Global Majority have been shaped by outsiders looking in. Migration is framed as a crisis for destination countries. Communities are reduced to statistics in someone else’s story. But what happens when filmmakers from these countries reclaim the narrative — not just locally, but on the world stage? It turns out the answer is simple: the story shifts when told from within. When local filmmakers step behind the camera and tell stories in their own words and with their own vision, they reclaim their histories and shake off stereotypes. They say, we are more than what others have shown you.

Colombia’s Imaginario works hand in hand with communities to recover memory and give voice to experiences long ignored or silenced. Through films and multimedia projects, they piece together fragments of the past to create a living archive for the future — open, shared, and accessible to everyone. In Africa, organizations like the Durban FilmMart Institut and the East African Screen Collective champion pan-African storytelling. They back filmmakers and create the conditions for “narrative sovereignty” to grow — so that African stories can travel widely and reflect the perspectives of the people who tell them.

These films do more than entertain. They heal. They resist. They hold up a mirror to their societies. This is their power: to represent and to reimagine, to create spaces where new voices reshape the conversation.

Piercing Colombia’s “social silence”

A multimedia project uses fiction and nonfiction to explore taboo topics in the country’s painful history.

When five teenagers in a small Colombian town stumble upon a body, they set off on an adventure that uncovers some of the darkest chapters of their country’s history. It sounds like the premise of a thriller series — and it is. But “Romper el silencio” (Breaking the Silence) is more than entertainment. It’s a central part of a carefully crafted toolkit for healing and dialogue in a country that has made progress toward peace but is still emerging from over 50 years of armed conflict.

Developed by Bogotá-based Fundación Imaginario with support from DW Akademie, “Breaking the Silence” uses edutainment — storytelling that engages emotions to confront painful or taboo issues. In this case, the goal was to pierce the “social silence” surrounding the country’s civil war: forced disappearances, the recruitment of child soldiers, and extrajudicial killings.

The multimedia, multi-partner project blends fiction and nonfiction. It includes a television drama, documentaries, podcasts, classroom guides, teacher training, an online platform and community screenings followed by facilitated discussions.

“Stories can break the ice for further dialogue,” Imaginario Director Adelaida Trujillo explains. “Fiction drives people through emotional engagement, through engaging with characters without being told what to do or think.”

The fictional series centers on 18 characters — including a landowner complicit in extrajudicial killings, a Black rapper whose father has disappeared, and a teenager in gender transition whose parents left the guerrillas, among others. The characters in the produced teasers are so authentic that viewers often believe they are real.

With DW Akademie’s support, the project began with a year of intense research followed by workshops that brought creative teams together with experts on trauma, violence and conflict resolution to translate research into scripts. The process developed partnerships in Colombia, Latin America and Africa.

Out of this collaboration came The Transformative Power of Storytelling, a guide documenting the project’s methods in both Spanish and English. “This is a very important legacy of DW Akademie’s support,” Adelaida says. “We wrote down everything we did and learned, and now we’re sharing it internationally.” In a country still working through the trauma of conflict, “Breaking the Silence” shows how stories can create space for conversations long avoided and how film can support collective healing and more open public dialogue.