Cine Campesino

Well I’m back. It was a gruesome but beatifull 13 day tour. Luckily I had a very good assistant. I will need one. The wait, the set up and breaking down need some extra hands. And my driving 2 extra eyes. Then we picked up a hitchhiker who turned out to be a reporter from Honduras This Week, an English lenguage newspaper, I was interviewed while driving, here is the piece.

For the most part it was a great success. We visited 11 communities and did 10 film festivals. Some were big successes, over 200 people came, some generated not more than 25. This was because the town was simply too big and developed to have such a delicate thing as a Arte Acción Film Festival. In almost all the towns I saw the same problem. People have a very short attention span. There for I designed a program that would keep them watching.

This is the way it’s set up. After all has been set up, I goof around some with the kids and then when it becomes dark enough I start with something for them. It was Don Quixote in the beginning but this proved to dull and it was in Castellano Spanish. Most kids lost it after 3 minutes. The rest of the tour was finished by Walt Disney’s Goofy and friends. They could capture the attention of the kids and trough their laughter adults would come and have their first taste of the Film Festival. Goofy ends one cartoon with saying that if you play clean and as a team you can beat everybody. Right on Goofy!!!

Then I would introduce myself and Arte Acción. I would thank the organizing committee for inviting me and announce the next movies. If the committee wanted to say something they could. I would then explain the context of the second movie. It is always a short with a message. People here aren’t as interested in a message as westeners are. In some villages they would laugh right at the faces of the people singing in Bocas de Ceniza and in one village the funniest film was one about rebuilding Honduras after hurricane Mitch. This one last one is 50 minutes and after 30 I have to crank up the level of sound or shout “Silencio” once or twice. I think it is best to have very strong educational shorts and then good movies to end with.

The movie to end with was a Cantinflas comedy in most cases. I’ve grown to like him, his movies are simple, enjoyable and have very good strong messages, eventhough they are sometimes hidden. other movies I show are Todo Sobre Mi Madre, Santitos, Bolivia and La Ciudad. La hora de los hornos is a very good and strong movie but unfortunately in a bad shape and to complex for most people. Everybody walked away in Olanchito. Only the gringos stayed. These new batches of films (thank you guys) will give me more choices.

The grand total of film festivals is now 90 and we’re going for more, the time has come to begin the repetitions. I will go to the same villages now for the second time, I’ll crank up the level of the movie a little bit, I just bought a new batch of tapes and I copied some other stuff here in Honduras. It gives me some leverage. The idea is that I have 2 shorts and 5 feature films on a wide range of subjects. That way I have a big choice and I raise the level slowly. It makes it also easy for a town to understand if all the movies we show are of one theme.