Home Is Distant Shores

**** Home is distant shores is an online curated website. if your film, music video or trailer is not available free to view (public) then we cannot accept your work ***** HOME IS DISTANT SHORES - CURATED WEBSITE Home Is Distant Shores started as a film festival. It's successful run for three years is a testament to the committed filmmakers who relentlessly work to share immigrant and refugee stories. Unfortunately, the mere nature of film festivals limit us from selecting and sharing large number of films. It's unfair to filmmakers and stories that are narrated. We want to change that. In addition to an annual film festival, we'd like to constantly share films through our highly visible website (https://www.homeisdistantshores.com). So send us your work which is publicly viewable or trailers which are prelude to your forthcoming work. BACKGROUND Bungalow, cottage, flat, gaff, hut, ranch, kulia, siheyuan, yurt are some of the ways we describe our dwelling. Perhaps the most complex question immigrants and refugees have trouble answering is - Where is home? Is it the place where you are physically located? Is it where your heart is? It is where your memories are? With that in mind, we decided to build a curated website and a film festival that celebrates the lives and experiences of immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, expats who left their land of birth for myriad of reasons and moved to a new country. We are interested in wide variety of topics such as migration journey, border security, education, employment, documented and undocumented immigration, community integration, family separation, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), resettlement of refugee and asylum seekers etc. We encourage various storytellers to share their work with almost 800,000 immigrants who reside in North Carolina state and beyond. ABOUT HOME IS DISTANT SHORES FILM FESTIVAL The film festival was launched in October 2019 and was organized by two non-profit organizations, namely, International Focus and the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants -North Carolina and an independent film production company-VerveFilms. The three-day event included fictional and documentary pieces from local filmmakers, panel discussions, and a celebratory reception. In 2020, we went online and presented 25 films and music video which was viewed by more than 2000 individuals from all over the world. In 2021, due to resurgence of COVID delta variant we moved the festival online. We showcased 19 films from all over the world. In order to encourage storytelling of various kinds Home Is Distant Shores will be a curated website and a theatrical film festival planned for 2022.