Ciné Institute Students courageous coverage featured on Salon.Com
Haiti's film students find a new mission
Many of Annie Nocenti's film students at the Ciné Institute in Jacmel, Haiti, lost their homes in this week's devastating earthquake. Some may have lost friends and family members; as in much of the country, the scope of the disaster is not yet clear. "But they are out on the streets now, shooting and editing," she says. "They can get into places nobody else will ever go, and interview people outside news crews will never meet. This is what we trained them for."
When Nocenti, a New York filmmaker, first arrived at the Ciné Institute two years ago, she found a community of students eager to learn the craft at the Caribbean nation's only film school -- even though they had seen very few feature films. "Haiti has almost no infrastructure for cinema and very few working movie theaters," she says.
Together with David Belle, the institute's founder, Nocenti developed a two-part vision for film education in Haiti. On one level, it was purely practical. "We wanted to get them jobs in the very small film industry that exists in Haiti. So they learned how to operate the cameras, how to hold a boom." But Belle and Nocenti also wanted to encourage the development of an indigenous and distinctive brand of Haitian cinema, inspired in part by "Nollywood," the no-budget film industry of Nigeria, among the largest in the developing world.
"We're beginning to see the emergence of an auteur vision, through Haitian eyes," Nocenti says. "It's influenced by their culture, their art, by the voodoo tradition. Because these filmmakers are not copying anybody, what's coming out of them is very pure. They weren't raised in a video store. They've never seen a Quentin Tarantino movie."
Report from student: Fritzner Simeus from Jacmel from Ciné Institute on Vimeo.
No comments:
Post a Comment