On the Road to FESPACO

I remember hearing about FESPACO, the largest African Film Festival and African Film Market, when I was in college and was cutting my first 16mm film, Crossing Holy Waters, on Taale Rosselini's Steinbeck flatbed because the ones at school were overbooked. He had worked in Burkina Faso in the Peace Corps, and had made several beautiful films out there. He had an award from FESPACO that was a bronze baobab tree, and right away, I decided I would have to be in the festival in the near future. Well, it's taken me 16 years, but it's going down. I submitted my Ethiopian Film, The Seed, as a work in progress and got the invitation to the festival a month ago, complete with airfare and expenses taken care of. Because of a technical problem with my film (for your filmmakers, I shot with a Panasonic AG-HVX200 in 24pn mode mini dv, and digitized it at 24 frames a second instead of using the 3:2 2:3 pulldown) I had to recut my film, using my old edit as a map, but eyeballing each shot to match the previous selection. I moved into my editing studio in Dumbo and grinded 18 hour days for the last ten days straight, with the crecendo of pulling in mi bredren Hisham Haj Omar to come out and iron out the last minutiae as we convert the film to PAL for the festival.
The process has had me thinking a lot about the journey this film took me on. It started in 2007. I went to Ethiopia to do a documentary on the Revolution of 1974 as research to enable me to write a script on the subject told from a beaurocrat's 11 year old daugher, a lion in the palace, a student activist in the Ethiopian Student Movement, a repatriated Rasta from Jamaica living in Shashemene, and a guard assigned to watch Emporer Haile Sellassie I during his house arrest. I was spending a lot of time at Addis Abeba University interviewing professors who were instrumental in the Ethiopian Student movement and stumbled on the story of priests in Axum who had deciphered heirogliphics that prophecized that the oncoming millennium would be the beginning of a golden age, a renaissance where the oppressive and destructive forces on earth will be destroyed. I wanted to go to Axum and interview them, but was low on funds. Seeing all the homeless youth in the streets made me want to make a film that could benefit them by establishing a foundation to help get them off the streets and into boarding schools. One day I looked into the eyes of a little boy selling napkins, and I saw a sage looking back at me... and that was the birth of idea for The Seed.
So here I am, been awake for he last 27 hours and the film is in the final process of PAL conversion from NTSC. I will update with stories from Burkina Faso as it all goes down.
perfectlove
jbee