A Day (and evening) in Leogane

After a hot morning in the back of the pick up truck trying to find a working ATM  (it turned out the Visa connection to Haiti is down), we drove over to Leogane. Leogane’s a country town about an hour from Port au Prince and was at the epicentre of the earthquake – it sustained some of the most severe damage.

Driving around the town we bumped into some international volunteers from Hands On Disaster Relief…  and went over to their base to say hello.  Behind their compound there’s a big field with the first cows we’ve seen in Haiti grazing it.  On either side of the field there are people living in tent camps so we decided to do a screening that evening…

We started setting up late afternoon and  children quickly started appearing from both camps… by the time it actually god dark and we started the films we had a good crowd of about 150 – mostly children.

We're going to go back to Leogane in a weeks time and stay for a few days.

Downtown Leogane

On Wednesday we went over to a little school where our friend Will Le Le works. Since the earthquake all the schools are shut,  but this one takes place under some tarpaulins in a yard and is run by volunteers – mostly local young people.  The children come from the camps in the neighbourhood…This was our first experience where the audience have just been kids – at the camps and even at the hospital on Tuesday night we usually end up with the little kids at the front, the older kids behind them …  and then the majority of the audience ends up being adults standing at the back. Here the children definitely felt like they owned the space, and there was a total party atmosphere… Here’s how the evening went – First we took some photos of the audience and projected them … to huge cheers and laughter. And then …

The Magic Horse- one of Lotte Reineger’s magical silhouette films  –   A fairytale set  in Baghdad.   The English dialogue was translated by John Adam on the mic.Best moment of improvised dialogue (in Kreyol) – ” then the prince met the princess..ok, in a moment the princess is going to arrive…  hey everyone Relax!  she’s going to appear in a moment ! ”

Ti Sentaniz – Kreyol language animation about a little girl who is an unpaid servant for an abusive rich woman and her daughter. Sadly not a fairytale ;  this form of modern domestic slavery is not uncommon in Haiti. Written and narrated by the late great Haitian poet, humourist and raconteurMaurice Sixto, We can’t find it on the internet, but there’s a “Making of …here

Message from Josh Sundquist, the Canadian paralympic ski racer, who lost one of his legs to cancer at the age of 10 This is a great video (made by the mighty Sinema anba Zetwal) pledging solidarity with Haitian kids who have undergone amputations since the earthquake, and shows Canadian and Haitian amputees playing football …

you can see the Kreyol language version that we show … here
La Belle Fille et Le Sorciere One of our tried and tested audience favourites. (lots of magicians and sorcerers in tonight’s programme… and finally the main feature – Kirikou et la Sorcier. Michel Ocelot’s animated feature film based on an West African folk tale. We’d recommend this film to everyone, whatever your age is…  But then the screen went….generator problems…. we got it going a couple of times…..  but after the third time the generator cut out and the  projector stopped we had to call it a night.The kids didn’t seem phased by this though… an impromptu song and dance session got going,you can hear a bit of it here –party2 and everyone went off smiling and laughing into the night…

This little bit of video was supposed to go with an earlier post but this is the first time we’ve had a fast enough internet connection to upload it…

The little girl on the left reminds us a lot of the Haiti Kids Kino project manager Esther May Campbell 😉

A lot of people in Haiti speak a little French, which is why we show films in French – but Kreyol is the real language of the people and definitely the language of our audience.The structure of the language comes from West African languages while most of the words come from French.Kreyol is written phonetically, but for a French accent, so we’ve invented our own phonetic spellings –
Children’s Cinema                     Sinema Pou Timoun
How are you?                            Comment oo yay?
Fine                                             Mwa byen
My name is …                            Mwa rer-lay….
What’s your name?                  Ki jan oo rer-lay?
Do you have…?                         Oo ganya… ?
Where is…. ?                             Coo-tay … ?
Bral appren Kreyol.                 I’m going to learn Kreyol.<

Kids invade our pickup truck at the camp on Route Delmar 33 – Saturday afternoon Sergo our driver and team member is in the top left photo

After being rained off at Delmar 33 on Thursday, we went back and did a show on Saturday. As the camp is on a football pitch, we showed Ballon D’Or a film about a boy from a rural village in Guinea who wants to become the best footballer in Africa.