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

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

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