On a typical night in Northern Kenya's Kakuma Refugee Camp, some 4,000 refugees from across Africa gather before a 12-foot by 16-foot movie screen that hangs from the side of a truck in an open, dusty plain. The crowd stands transfixed for several hours -- they prefer standing to sitting on the coarse desert floor -- as the evening’s films play onscreen. Kakuma’s refugees have been doing this three to four nights a week since 2001, when FilmAid first came to their camp. The creation of movie producer Caroline Baron, FilmAid International has a simple mission: to use film to enrich the disrupted lives of displaced people. The idea came to Baron in 1999 when she heard a radio report about the despair of Kosovar refugees. She recalls, "All I had was this desperate need to do something."
