Category: Story telling

“If we don’t tell our stories, no one else will”

Image courtesy Maisha Labs

An unpretentious, matter-of-fact press release arrived in my email overnight from Maisha Film Lab in Kampala, Uganda. It started as follows:

“MAISHA, the annual training program for East African Filmmakers founded by director Mira Nair (Namesake, Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding) is now in its third year of operation. Housed in Munyonyo, Kampala, the three-week lab (which takes place from July 21st to August 11th, 2007) is currently training 9 filmmakers, 3 sound mixers, 3 cinematographers, and 3 editors with world-renowned filmmaking professionals.”

The press release then listed Maisha’s 2007 mentors. Among them:
– Jason Filardi (Writer, Bringing Down The House)
– Joshua Marston (Writer/Director, Maria Full of Grace)
– Alison Maclean (Writer/Director, Jesus’ Son)
– David Keating (Writer/Director, Last of the High Kings)
– Drew Kunin (Production Sound Mixer, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Zodiac)
– Kerwin DeVonish (2nd Unit DP, Inside Man)
– Barry Alexander Brown (Editor, Inside Man, Malcolm X), and
– Fellipe Barbosa (Director, Salt Kiss)

Wow – Mira has succeeded in rounding up some of the best film industry talent in North America. All these professionals are donating their time, so that African film-makers can sharpen their skills in making better moving images.

But it’s the mission of Maisha that interests me most — because it so resonates with what we at TVE Asia Pacific have been advocating in Asia in our own small way: equipping and empowering local film-makers to tell their own stories to their people and the world.

Maisha’s tagline says it all: “If we don’t tell our stories, no one else will”

As their website explains: “Film is easily one of the most far-reaching mediums in the modern world, one that essentially validates a culture. In the entire African continent, there are few, if any, training programs for aspiring filmmakers.

“The few films that take place in East Africa are often made by foreigners without local crews, and generally focus on the political turmoil that plagues the region. While there is a flourishing and vital writing and theatre culture in the region, the bridge to convert this talent into screenplays and films has yet to be built.”

MAISHA (meaning “life” in Kiswahili) provides new screenwriters and film directors from East Africa (Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda) and South Asia (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh) with access to the professional training and production resources necessary to articulate their visions.

Mira Nair image from Harvard University Gazette

Maisha aims to preserve, cultivate and unleash local voices from these regions, and to become one of the first targeted programs to offer structured and accessible resources to these emerging filmmakers. MAISHA is motivated by the belief that a film which explores the truths and idiosyncrasies of the specifically local often has the power to cross over and become significantly universal.

Read more about Maisha Filmmaker Lab

Maisha has selected three short films from this year’s participants’ submitted screenplays. These films are currently in production, crewed entirely by Maisha trainees. The cast is culled from the Kampala theater community. They are:

Must be a God-Fearing Christian Girl
Directed by Wanjiru Kairu, Kenya
John Webuye is a smart, successful man- living at home with his mother. After some failed attempts at internet dating, he finds love in the most unexpected of places.
Assistant director: Consodyne Buzabo, Production Manager: Victor Dimo Okello, Cinemtaographer: Ronald Kasirye, Sound Mixer: Richard Ndung’u, Editor: Risper Mbuthia.

The Trip
Directed by James Gayo, Tanzania
Pembe and Kaniki are two brothers on their way to interview for new jobs. Their bus breaks down along the way- and Kaniki’s wandering eye leads them in a different direction than they had anticipated.
Assistant Director: Jennifer Gatero, Production Manager: Kwezi Kaganda Runihda, Cinematographer: George Karugu, Sound Mixer: Theirry Dushimirimana, Editor: Zipporah Kimundu.

What Happened in Room 13
Directed by Dilman Dila, Uganda
Peter’s wife, Oliva, is pregnant and in the hospital, which gives her wayward husband an excuse to run off to a cheap motel with his best friend’s wife, Prossy. After their encounter leaves Prossy fatally injured, Peter tries desperately to cover his tracks.
Assistant Director: Ayuub Kasasa Mago, Production Manager: Anthony Njeru Thandi, Cinematographer: Nicholas Mtenga, Sound Mixer: Moses Hussain, Editor: Patrick Sekyaya.

Read: June 2004: Mira Nair Launches MAISHA, Film Laboratory for East Africans, South Asians

Read Mira Nair’s profile on Maisha website

Note: One of my claims to fame is that Mira Nair and I are both on the Board of Governors of Ujala TV, the South Asian educational broadcasting venture that I wrote about a few weeks ago. And last month, Mira’s latest film Namesake reduced me to tears in public.

Mine is shorter than yours…yipeee!

In the topsy turvy media world, ‘conventional wisdom’ about film-making is being rapidly undone by the march of what is now known as ‘Digital Natives‘ — those currently under 30 years, who have grown up taking Internet, mobile phones and video games completely for granted.

These Digital Natives are not inclined to watch long duration documentaries. Five minutes is about right. With effort, we can get them to sit through an offering of 10 to 15 minutes. Half an hour is ‘really long’. One hour or 90 minute films — just forget it.

The sooner we face up to this reality, the better. We may not like it, but it’s not the end of the world.

In fact, it challenges us in the media to strive for greater economy of words and time.

As anyone who has worked in television news will confirm, it is indeed possible to tell a story in 100 seconds, if we package it well and carefully. Purists might call it dumbing down of television. Pragmatists would see it as customising to suit new audience realities. I go along with the latter view.

TVE Asia Pacific is not a broadcaster on its own. We produce and distribute content to over three dozen TV channels and networks spread across the Asia Pacific, now home to the world’s largest television audience. It’s through these ‘Emperors of Eyeballs’ (as I like to call them!) that we reach out.

Our broadcast partners have a good idea what their audiences want. Channel after channel tells us that the preference is for shorter, more compact programming. It would be naive to ignore this feedback and market intelligence.

The truth is: we can communicate ‘serious’ content — as long as the packaging and duration are to suit the audience realities.
That’s why TVE Asia Pacific’s recent productions have mostly followed the 5 minute format: we begin, tell and end a self-contained story in just 300 seconds.

Our recent series are examples: The Greenbelt Reports, Digits4Change and Living Labs.

The Greenbelt Reports by TVE Asia Pacific

And that’s a lot of time on screen. We have covered complex issues in exactly five minutes: for example, combating soil salinity with low cost methods; building ‘bio-shields’ of mangroves against the sea’s ravages; and using webcams and satellite links for tele-health.

These and other films continue to be broadcast and used in a range of education, advocacy and awareness efforts across the Asia Pacific and beyond.

No one has really complained about them being too short — except for some film-makers. Some have dismissed our efforts as ‘tabloid television’ and ‘not really documentaries’.

We remain unaffected. We do produce half hour documentaries from time to time, for specific purposes and defined audiences. But to ignore the mass audience trends would be to box ourselves into a tiny part of the audio-visual landscape.

We now know it is much harder to produce shorter films than longer ones. The challenge is to distill and compress without oversimplification or distortion.

So the sooner film-makers get over their obsession with length, the better. It’s not the duration of a film that matters most; it’s how a story is told. Some of the best stories are also the shortest.

To cite my favourite example from the print world, Ernest Hemingway once bet his friends 10 dollars that he could write a self-contained, full story in less then 10 words. He produced what is still considered the world’s shortest short story:
“For sale.
Baby shoes.
Never worn.”

It’s hard to beat that one for its amazing economy of words and sheer power of story telling.

How short is short today? Read leading wildlife film-maker Neil Curry’s views in my post on 27 July 2007

Read my post: Moving images move heart first, mind next

Read my post: Can you make a one-minute film for a better planet?