Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Advancing Institutional Excellence Initiatives
Bronze
"Empowering Health Care and Medical Research in the MENA Region” is a short-form narrative documentary video that focuses on Navid Madani, Ph.D., a researcher who founded the Science Health Education (SHE) Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The video shows how the SHE Center aims to empower the health care community in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) especially in the areas of breast and gynecologic cancers and then pivots to show how, as a Dana-Farber patient herself, Navid is even more motivated to bring the resources she has access to the region.
What was the most impactful part of your entry?
The video addresses the need to raise the profile of the SHE Center and its three-fold mission to build capacity through furthering education, supporting research, and enabling patient advocacy related to women’s cancers in the MENA region. At the same time, it also seeks to highlight the work of Navid Madani and embeds the story of the SHE Center narratively within Navid’s personal history as a cancer patient herself. We wanted a video that would well receive on social media but would also be also a useful tool for the SHE Center on their part of the Dana-Farber website and a way to showcase the Center in an engaging way. We also knew it could be used in the many meetings with patients, healthcare providers, and researchers in the MENA region.
What is one thing you learned from your entry/experience?
We needed this video to work for a Middle East and North Africa region audience, and we faced a big challenge with regards to this.
We had to rely on using stock imagery for that region. Much of the stock imagery and video available is biased towards a Western eye in two ways. The first is through the lens of tourism. And the second is through the lens of violence in the Middle East. The stock was feeding into western preconceptions and prejudices of what the Middle East and North Africa are like. While it was easy to weed out the clips featuring violence or implied violence, it wasn’t so easy to filter out some of the clips that were shot through a western visitor’s gaze of what they expected everyday life in the region might look like. We solved this by having our in-house video producer sit down with Ru’a and review every clip that had been proposed for use. She would choose what was appropriate to a MENA region audience. They would end up doing extensive searches through stock libraries to make sure the video was as culturally aware as it could be, showed the diversity of the region, and was inclusive of the wide variety of populations that live there or would seek treatment there.
Contact: PJ Kaszas
peggy_kaszas@dfci.harvard.edu