Remarks

Remarks at the Opening of Wild Cinema’s Documentary Workshop
Ray Castillo, Director, American Cultural Center
April 20, 2009

Thank you very much for the opportunity to address you and give my thoughts on the importance of documentary film as it addresses education and culture.  Before I start though, I would like to thank Wild Cinema for sponsoring this workshop.  The U.S. government has the pleasure of supporting this excellent film festival through grants of over $N 40,000.  We were especially pleased to be able to assist with this documentary workshop by helping our fellow American, Ms. Jeannie Magill, to travel here to take part.  I would like to extend my welcome to Jeannie Magill, the Co-Producer of Milking the Rhino.   I also wish the best of luck in the competition to Dudley Vial and the team that produced By the People, for the People. 

I am not a film maker by trade or training but I have produced television and I think that some of the principles are the same.  As I thought about the importance of documentary film in addressing  education and culture, my thoughts shifted to what I think is a more essential theme for a film maker when looking at making a documentary film and one which I imagine you will discuss during this workshop.  

For me, the key to a great documentary is a great story.  You want to tell an interesting story, an important story, a gripping story, one that may shed new light or uncover the truth.  Perhaps you might uncover a scandal or expose an injustice, or show the beauty of a culture.  Ultimately, you cannot do this without a good story.

Now you also need good camera work and editing, compelling visuals, top notch sound, a distribution network, etc., but I want to stick with the story. This basic key to a good documentary, in my view, is the same basic component for a feature, a music video, an industrial, or television news.  It all starts with the story.

As a viewer and a critic of documentary film, I am also keenly aware of the director’s voice and choices in telling the story.  We are often shown new “truth” in documentary films but there is also subjectivity.  I do not think that this is bad or wrong but both the creator and the audience need to recognize it.

I think that you can easily see the importance of the story and the director’s voice by looking at some of the top documentaries. I did a little, very unscientific research on this topic.  Let me share some of my results.

Last year, the International Documentary Association announced its list of the top 25 documentaries of all time.  Its 2800 members had the opportunity to vote on a list of 700 titles.  The top ten were:

Hoop Dreams
The Thin Blue Line
Bowling for Columbine
Spellbound
Harlen County USA
An Inconvenient Truth
Crumb
Give Me Shelter
The Fog of War
Roger and Me

You see here fascinating stories:  exposing the U.S. criminal justice system, the gun industry and the auto industry; following inner city youth and their professional basketball dreams; young spellers and a fierce competition; and the genius of a rogue artist, to describe a few.  These stories reached out and grabbed us.  As writers and directors of documentaries, you need to do the same.  You may have other goals but you need to have a story to hang them on.

Now, I do not want to suggest that these are the end all and be all of documentaries.  I notice that Ken Burns, Michael Apted and John Marshall are not there.  Yet their stories of jazz, class society in the U.K., and the San people of Namibia are surely among the top documentary stories of all time.

Now let me come back to the two documentaries that I viewed prior to writing these remarks.   Milking the Rhino and By the People, for the People are very different movies and they each tell different stories on a related theme.  I found both of them powerful, interesting and relevant.  I applaud this film festival for helping them to reach a bigger audience, for ultimately that is what they are produced to do.

Both of these films gave me an education about the conservancy movement.  They also showed me more than I had known about the culture of communities that are at the heart of the movement.  Cultural education was perhaps not the ultimate goal of these films but it was one of the benefits that I took away from watching these well told stories.  

The reason for this is that the directors chose to elevate African voices and issues.  They allowed Africans to speak and be heard and be seen in their complexity.

I need to confess that I was involved in By the People, for the People in a small way.  This film was funded by USAID through the WWF to celebrate the work of the CBNRM program.  The filmmakers tell a wonderful success story about how some of the poorest members of Namibian society have brought game back to their lands and are managing their conservancies in a sustainable and economically beneficial way for the communities.  It tells the story of many partners - international donors, government, NGOs, and, most importantly, the people themselves.

I love the individual voices. The elder auntie from the Torra Conservancy is especially memorable.  The film also shows how the Namibian people are working to incorporate their traditions with modern wildlife management.  This film gives us a true African success story.

Milking the Rhino focused on two specific communities in its look at conservancies.   I love this movie.  I love it for all the complexity it brought to the topic and I also appreciated the characters that I met in the film.  You have James in Kenya trying to convince local ranchers of the benefits of the game lodge.  They counter that they have no use for game except as food and they wonder if the tourism might dry up as happened after 9/11.

Then there is the John in Namibia who tries to forge consensus between the old auntie and the lodge owner and convince traditional farmers not to just the kill lions but to work with conservationists and the government so that all can prosper.

I liked the honest discussion about race.   We see the white Kenyan farmer who started a conservancy and safari and was not immediately trusted but who is now consulted by the local black elders.   Similarly, in Namibia, there is honest discussion between the John and the lodge owner.  From my point of view, stop sweeping the desert and let the Himba display their wares.

Here are two men living in both the traditional and the modern worlds and trying to forge a new way for the benefit of their communities.  At one point, people lament that the culture might go away.  The next moment you see a lodge worker in Kenya singing a traditional song about cattle.  You also meet a young Himba woman, in traditional dress, speaking in front of a group of elders and men about her essential oil project.

This is great stuff. They are great stories and they show a part of Africa that the rest of the world needs to see. 

We often criticize the media for only showing the bad stories of Africa.  It often seems that is all they show of Africa.  So perhaps I can point to a role for the documentary filmmaker in educating us about African culture.  As you give us your gripping and compelling stories, your truth, also show us the true voices of your characters in their complexity.  Don’t whitewash it.  Show me these new Africans, like James from Kenya and John from Namibia, and also show me those who have no interest in conservation, those who would kill the lions because that is what they have traditionally done.

In the film, a woman who is a director of an African NGO tells us that by opening up conservation to the community, by taking away the command aspect of it, it became more complex.  Show me that complexity.  Show me all of these people, in their complexity, and let me learn.  This is the education that I need to see.  This is an education the world can use.

Thank you