Leaving one island for another...

A couple of months ago, I found out I had been accepted into the International Film School in Cuba (EICTV), a film school that was founded originally on the principle of educating students from Latin America, Asia and Africa. So I'm off to live on a farm just outside of Havana for three years to make films with  Brazilians, Tanzanians, Haitians, and just about any other nationality you can think of.

Here is the  motivation letter I had to wrote as part of the application process to get into the school:

Question: Why do you want to be a filmaker?

Perhaps this image helps  answer this question. It was a photo I took in 2007 in the Ecuadorian Amazon of a letter co-written by the Haoarani people asking for the....... And it was the experiences I had in this community as a naive, innocent and curious 18 year old that has shaped my desire to make films, even if I didn’t know it then. 

Imagine being that 18 year old sitting with an old man, dressed in nothing but a with a blue beaded necklace, listening to him speak about the history of his people.  Then see him smiling  only  to reveal a gold tooth which Texaco, the petroleum company, has given to him  in exchange for some of his land.  What do you do with the contradictions that hit you with this image? 

Or imagine being in a house where a Haoarani woman is cooking (monkey) meat and you are making empanadas over the other side of the house and she rushes to you in amazement because she has never seen flour before. But in the background is Ecuadorian pop music on a loud stereo which again, the oil companies have given her.  Do I simply keep these images to myself? Yes I know these stories have been told before, stories of exploitation and identity, but they can be told in an infinite number of ways in a thousand different realities across the world. And I want to tell them I want to make other eyes see things that until now have only existed in my mind or the mind of the community. Things that have been abstract or confusing because they were never defined visually.

I’ve tried to express it in other ways..I have  done countless protests and student occupations, I’ve tried to theorise poverty and land exploitation,  quantify it through graphs and statistics, in my study of economics. But I don’t think that anything can spread ideas and inspire and touch humans in the way that film can. It provokes emotions in me that nothing else can. It makes me feel human and I’d like to think it makes others feel human too.

Nelson Mandela once said that the film 'Cry Freedom did more to stop apartheid than his 27 years on Robin Island. That is an astonishing statement and regardless of whether that is true or not, film still has this beautiful, magical and casual way of touching people. A way to change their perceptions and to make them feel emotions that they don’t always feel. And i want to be part of that.  Because who doesn’t want the power to inspire people? To maker them cry or laugh hysterically in one moment? To transport them to a culture or reality that they are reaching for but have no access to?

Two years ago, I experienced something traumatic, one which I talk about in my self portrait film and one which has changed my perspective of life considerably. It is a delicate subject and one which is hard to comprehend. I want to use the emotions, the empathy that comes with such an experience to tell the story of others who have also gone through it.  To help them, and in some ways to help myself.

And what about all this different blood of mine? The beauty of my Hindu  grandmother whose sari I always used to hide behind in fear of Indian men with moustaches, or those of my father, a refugee from Uganda whose family hid all their gold in the soles of his shoes to come to this country. And of those  of having to learn how to use a knife and fork so that I could be a little more ‘English’ once I went to school. Of speaking Guajarati, peppered with Swahili at home and English outside.  Of Indian paneer, Ugandan motiki, traditional roast y caldo Peruano? I have to put them together somehow.

And yes, I really do want to depend on my imagination. Because I have nothing to lose. Apart from my sanity, but the more of that I lose, the more my imagination will grow. I want to tell you about refugee from Montserrat who I met in the market in London last week, who is in love with the Queen. About Bacha Posh, the rural Afghani tradition of cross dressing young girls. About Gorge, the father of the Cuban transvestite whose image still fills me with anxiety when I walk down the street. About the graffiti artist in the tunnel who likens each line he paints to a different path in life. About Gaylan, a Kurdish refugee, whose toenails were taken off as a form of punishment in a detention camp. He was 21.  Or the film that concentrates on celebrating the identity of refugees and not on why they left their country. Of the one thing they took with them on that journey. Be it a harmonica or a suitcase. About the man under the sheet of plastic who I fell in love with and lived with in the desert for three months. Who would play the didgeridoo on a sand dune come twilight to which all the dogs in the nearby village would run up to. Or the stories I would find if I collected all the short poems from rural villages in India. And yes Cuban hip hop, but through the eyes of the women in the music videos.

I want to make films because despite however good these ideas may sound to me, they probably seem awful to you and I need to go on a process of realising that. To develop ideas and to have the space to do it in. To make films about things I never thought I would. To get frustrated and obsessed and to lose sleep and to push myself to limits. 

Because thinking of the prospect of realising this ideas makes me feel alive and young and innocent and curious.  Yet old and wise and fully capable of dealing with the emotions of others and my own.

Because I want to take the risk.

Tarkovsky. And because i too want to make such shadows and reflections and metaphors.

Because very few ‘conventionally’ succeed in cinema. And because I measure success in the amount of people I can leave a part of me with  and them with me.

Because  I dont like the easy and comfortable.

Why Latin America?

This is the continent the best and worst things in my life have happened to me.  Of love and absolute trauma. And from this comes infinite inspiration and unconditional love. It is the continent where I learnt the beauty of independent filmmaking...where I learnt that yes, you can make a silent documentary still say something, where you can create portraits which focus on emotion rather than intellect, where the word ‘experimental’ is not a bad thing. It is the continent where I have had the most beautiful conversations, where I have done the most bizarre things and it has given me so much, good and bad that I feel I need to give back to it too. I love the elation I get when seeing a Latin American film at a festival, or a review of a film from the continent in Sound and Sight magazine, of hearing Andean music on the streets of London. And so, for me there is really only one place to make films.

Why EICTV?

I did a documentary taller there last summer and I know from this experience that if I were to study there for three years, it would be the most intense three years of my life and that is precisely why I want to study there. I know that this intensity would enable me to push myself emotionally to my boundaries and I need that, because if I am to draw things out of other people, I also need to draw them out of myself.

Because of the one to one project. That is me. A perfect reflection of my personality. A mirror clean. To trot off to a remote place, in the beautiful cloud forest, find people and stories and immerse myself in them and ask questions to my hearts content. To take a camera with me and make something tangible out of it. I remember I would escape from my taller classes just so I could see the evaluation of these films. Because it enabled me to transport myself to the place and wander what people I would find. 

And if anyone who happens to read this knows the former students who made the documentary  ‘Nada con Nadie’, please tell them that some Indian girl from England thought it was beautiful. Just beautiful. 

I want to study there because of the beautiful conversations I had in the rapidito. Because of the energy and life.

Because there exists a Camino de Pensamiento. Genius. And useful.

Because I too could see strength and stories in the eyes of the people who studies  there  and I want to collaborate with them, learn with them and from them and them from me.

Because I too am from the three worlds. Asia, Africa and Latin America

To be in Cuba and the intense experience of being in such an environment for so long. For the picture it likes to paint for tourists and the motivation behind it. For the fact that women wear all yellow ensembles.  For the fact that buses are called guaguas, a word that means baby in Chile.

I could write and write and at the same time write nothing at all, for my answer cannot possibly be explained in words. It would be like asking someone why they love their partner so much. You could perhaps explain certain things, but the overwhelming reason is so much more abstract that it could not possibly be explained. At least not for me.

Ultimately I want to make films because it makes me feel human. To the point that I am welling up writing this to you. I live by following my instinct and my instinct tells me that I want to and need to make films. I want to find emotions in the people who watch my films, in the realities I focus on and ultimately, in myself to.

Please note; the grammar in this is terrible and if my high school English teacher saw this, she would shoot me. But I just wanted to write and write what I truly felt so I have just splurged my emotions and thoughts on these sheets of paper.

It is also not 5 pages long, but I live in a concrete jungle and we could do with saving as many trees here as possible.