God Is Not Working on Sunday! Panel Discussion
Leona Goldstein, Helga Kirchner, Karen Knipp-Rentrop
The women’s rights organisation medica mondiale has been supporting traumatised women and girls in war and crisis zones throughout the world since 1993. It offers these victims of violence on-site psychological, legal aid and financial support. On a political level, medica mondiale defends women’s rights, demands that the perpetrators of all crimes be brought to justice and calls for effective protection, and justice and political empowerment for survivors of violence. Since 2008, medica mondiale has helped the Rwandan women’s rights organisation SEVOTA set up forums for women who have had children as a result of rape and defend the interests and rights of survivors and their children.
The screening of God Is Not Working on Sunday! will be followed by a discussion of the following questions: How are survivors coping in Rwanda 22 years after the genocide? What challenges does the younger generation face? Although women currently hold a majority in the Rwandan parliament with over 60 percent, what role do they really play in politics and society as a whole? Joining in the discussion: Leona Goldstein, director of God Is Not Working on Sunday! and Karen Knipp-Rentrop, Programme Officer for Africa’s Great Lakes region at medica mondiale. Moderated by Helga Kirchner, former editor-inchief of the public broadcasting organisation WDR.
Leona Goldstein
Born in 1976, the film-maker and photographer Goldstein studied visual communication in Rome, Dortmund and Berlin. In her film and photographic work, she questions border policies by focusing on civil rights, gender equality and migration. Her most recent projects document social movements in Cambodia, Venezuela, Burkina Faso, Mexico and within Europe. Goldstein has received numerous scholarships and awards, and her work is shown at international festivals. She has lectured on documentary film-making at Berlin University of Applied Sciences since 2012.
Films by Leona Goldstein
El poder es el pueblo 2010 | Au clair de la une 2007 | Le Heim 2005 | Transit-Home 2004
Helga Kirchner
Helga Kirchner began her career on youth radio at WDR Radio, presented morning and midday magazines on air, edited the Critical Journal and contributed to the guest commentary slot on Tagesthemen, ARD TV’s flagship news
programme. She helped develop the WDR radio phone-ins and for the ten years until her retirement, was in charge of the politics desk as radio editor-in-chief. For many years, she chaired the programme advisory committee of the Civis Media Foundation for Integration and Cultural Diversity in Europe. In 2010, the Association of Women Journalists awarded her the Hedwig Dohm Certificate.
Karen Knipp-Rentrop
After studying history, politics and anthropology at Freiburg University, Knipp-Rentrop spent over four years working for the Civil Peace Service in Rwanda in the areas of peace promotion and conflict prevention. She later joined the Ökumenisches Netz Zentralafrika, a network that campaigns for peace and defends human rights in the African Great Lakes region. She has worked as Programme Officer for the African Great Lakes region with medica mondiale since 2013, and supervises projects in Burundi, Rwanda and DR of Congo, especially in the province of South Kivu.
