Refugee Week, the UK-wide celebration of arts, culture, and community, returns from 16th to 22nd June 2025 under the theme ‘Community as a Superpower’.
An annual event aimed at celebrating the contributions, creativity and resilience of asylum seekers and refugees living in the UK, St Helens will mark the occasion with a range of events and activities coordinated by St Helens Borough Council’s Refugee Resettlement Service.
One of the headline events this year will be the inaugural St Helens Refugee Community Film Festival, which will spotlight powerful stories of migration, asylum, and resilience. The festival features several award-winning films, each accompanied by talks and related activities exploring their themes and relevance.
The festival is a collaboration between St Helens Borough Council’s Refugee Resettlement Service, the Arts in Libraries Service, and Lucem House Community Cinema Plus+. Screenings will run each evening from Wednesday 18th to Saturday 21st June, with an expanded Saturday programme including two additional screenings, one of which is a dedicated children’s session:
I’m Still Here (Wednesday 18th June at 7pm) is a political biographical drama based on a true story. In 1970’s Brazil, facing the tightening grip of a military dictatorship, Eunice Paiva, a mother of five children, is forced to reinvent herself when her former politician husband undergoes an enforced disappearance under the country’s dictatorship, leaving her to look after her family amidst political turmoil.
Human Flow (Thursday 19th June at 7pm) is a documentary, led by the internationally renowned artist Al Weiwei, that elucidates both the staggering scale of the refugee crisis and its profoundly personal human impact. Over 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change and war in the greatest human displacement since World War II.
Not Just Football (Friday 20th June at 7pm) is based on the true story of Gabriel Stauring, a young and enterprising activist from California who, frustrated at inaction surrounding the Darfur crisis, sets out to put together a football team of refugees with the dream of them playing in the World Cup.
Encanto (Saturday 21st June at 10.30am) is the tale of an extraordinary family who live hidden in the mountains of Columbia in a wondrous, charmed place called an Encanto, whose magic has blessed every child in the family from super-strength to the power to heal except for young Mirabel who must come to the rescue of her family when they start to lose their magic.
Limbo (Saturday 21st June at 2pm) is a British comedy-drama film which centres on four asylum seekers who are staying on a remote island in Scotland and taking cultural awareness classes while awaiting the processing of their asylum claims, in an offbeat observation of the refugee experience.
For Sama (Saturday 21st June at 7pm) is an epic and intimate documentary filmed through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria about a Syrian journalist and her doctor husband as they try to raise their daughter at the height of the Syrian civil war: should they flee the city to protect their young daughter’s life, when leaving would mean abandoning the struggle for freedom for which they have already sacrificed so much.
Tickets can be booked via www.lucemhouse.co.uk/whats-on with prices starting at £6 per screening (excluding Encanto for which tickets are priced at £1), with a Festival Pass available for £24, granting access to all five main films.
Organisers encourage early booking to avoid disappointment.
For more information about Refugee Week in St Helens, please contact Saulo Cwerner at SauloCwerner@sthelens.gov.uk or Anastasia Kulaeva at AnastasiaKulaeva@sthelens.gov.uk.
Please Note: All Refugee Week activities in St Helens are funded through central government asylum and refugee resettlement grants.
