“There Is No Connection Between Us and Our Children at All”: Pre-screening Dialogue as a Way to Establish Intergenerational Relationships

In the rural context of Eastern Cape, South Africa, where our project unfolded, gender-based violence remains rife, and programmes to address it do not seem to yield the desired results. We worked with seven secondary school Indigenous girls to lead dialogues in their rural school community using a digital dialogue tool in which various visual artefacts, also two cellphilms they had made, were embedded. The schoolgirls facilitated dialogues with peers, teachers, school governing body members, their parents, and the broader community, using the digital dialogue tool, pushing the boundaries of who is allowed to initiate a dialogue about gender-based violence in a rural community. In this article, we focus on how we inserted a pre-screening dialogue with the parents before the schoolgirls could have a dialogue with the broader community. We realized the value of adding a pre-screening dialogue as a step between cellphilming and the screening, to “test” the dialogue about addressing gender-based violence with the parents. This seemed to enable an intergenerational dialogue between the parents and the schoolgirls. Clearly, in our rural and under-sourced context in the Global South, cellphilming, complemented by a pre-screening dialogue, holds potential for deepening intergenerational relationships.