Description:
Over five years,
acclaimed filmmaker Andrea Dorfman follows the heartbreaking yet
uplifting story of the girls of Meru and their brave steps toward
meaningful equality for girls worldwide. In Kenya, one in three girls
will experience sexual violence before age 18, yet police
investigations are the exception. In The Girls of Meru, a
multinational team led by Canadian lawyer Fiona Sampson and Tumaini
Shelter head Mercy Chidi Baidoo builds the case of 11 girls to pursue
an unheard of legal tactic. Together they created legal history.
Biography: Andrea Dorfman is an artist, filmmaker and animator. She has directed the feature filmsParsley Days (2000), a TIFF top ten film, Love That Boy (2003), Heartbeat (2014), and the soon-to-be released Spinster. Her short film There's A Flower in my Pedal (2005) was runner up to Best Short at TIFF and the documentary, Sluts (2006) won Best Documentary at the Atlantic Film Festival. She completed two animated films with the National Film Board - the Emmy nominated, Flawed (2009), and Big Mouth (2012) which has toured children's festivals across the globe. Her feature doc, also produced by the NFB, The Girls of Meru (2018), recently premiered at Atlantic Canada's, FIN festival. Dorfman’s short mixed media video collaboration with Halifax poet-musician, Tanya Davis, How to Be Alone (2010), has garnered over 8 million YouTube hits and was adapted into a book published by HarperCollins - illustrated by Dorfman. She also adapted and illustrated Flawed to book form and it will be released as a YA graphic memoir by Firefly Canada, October 2018. Dorfman occasionally teaches at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and was the co-creator of Blowhard, a thematic storytelling series that ran for 7 years in Halifax where she lives with her partner, Dave, and his kids (half the time) Max and Sydney and a menagerie of pets.
