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30614: Pershing (repoy) Re: 30608: Spinelli (reply) Re: 30598: Spinelli (reply) Corbett (reply) Jacmel Film Festival (fwd)




From: tjpershing@aol.com

The first Jakmel Film Festival, which I attended, showed 60 films over 10 days, during a time of great political turmoil- They showed films by the Haitian master filmaker Raoul Peck, documentaries both pro and con on Aristide, powerful films on the global AIDs epidemic, small films on various aspects of Haitian life- People from the outlying countryside we provided vans to get into town- many, many kids we able to see and hear things about the world outside their villages for the first time. All screenings were free, and every night the town was crowded with a couple thousand people viewing two feature films and a short on a huge outdoor screen. As a photojournalist I've witnessed lots of nasty stuff- those ten days were among the most lovely I've seen- I remember sitting in a screening of an old crowing rooster film, and a young woman, just a child at the time of filming, was deriding a woman calling for the return of Arisitide- then the woman in the film started talking about what she wanted, what Haiti needed,freedom, democracy, education, jobs . . . and the young woman got very quiet, and listened intently to her counterpart over time- this is where it can start, in a small screening room in an old coffee warehouse when a young woman suddenly sees history as anything but the past. Sometimes, the mind gets hungry too.

Tim Pershing