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Ecuador

Ecuador Delegation
November 7–19

Delegate Expert: Maria Raquel Bozzi
Filmmaker: Stanley Nelson

Cities: Quito, Otavalo, Imbabura Valley, Chota Valley, Coca, Guayaquil

Delegate Report


By Maria Raquel Bozzi

Executive Summary

For two weeks in November, I traveled with documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson and his latest film, Freedom Riders, throughout Ecuador, latitude 0º 0” 0’. From the hippest art-house theaters in Quito and Guayaquil to the first multiplex in the Amazon town of Coca, we engaged with Ecuadorian audiences in a dialogue about race, documentary filmmaking techniques, and the power of the people when they organize to bring about change.

We visited a wide range of universities as well—from elite communications and film schools to the public Central University of Ecuador—and met with more than 400 young students eager to learn from the pros. Questions ranged from, “Why didn’t the Kennedys act immediately in response to acts of violence in the South?” and “Why didn’t Martin Luther King join the Freedom Riders?” to “Has Obama changed the game for blacks in the United States?” and “What do you think of the Arizona immigration laws?” The more sophisticated film students wanted to know about interviewing techniques, and learn about staging reenactments, working with archival footage and weaving a story with the voices of the people as opposed to an omnipresent narrator.

As we discussed these issues with students, filmmakers, and general audiences, I realized that perhaps some Americans still don’t recognize the importance of the Freedom Riders in the early stages of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States as much as they should. Hence the great significance of Stanley’s film, which reminds us that the Civil Rights Movement involved the courage and will of thousands of young people who took the challenge upon themselves, in a nonviolent way, to fight against the strict segregation laws of the South. It was not all about Martin Luther King Jr. All the youth needed to do to infuriate the citizens and politicians of the South was to board a bus side-by-side, black and white, as they entered the ideological line that divided the North and South of our country. As Freedom Riders skillfully uncovers an important moment in America’s history, it also provides context to our current situation and allows us to see the value and applications of the lessons of the past to the present. I believe that these dialogues around Stanley’s film also allowed Ecuadorians to reflect upon the racial boundaries within their own society.

In addition to our talks and presentations at different venues, we had the chance to visit diverse ethnic regions of Ecuador, including Otavalo, with its predominantly indigenous community, and the Valley of Chota, an enclave of Afro-Ecuadorian culture, where we joined Ecuadorian filmmaker Pablo Palacios, who was shooting his documentary Las Tres Marias. As we met the villagers, we were treated with music made with a single leaf, farming chants, and Bomba dance performed by an elderly woman as she balanced a bottle on her head.

In addition to Freedom Riders, the following films were screened in Ecuador during the delegation. Due to our busy schedule we were not able to attend any of these screenings:

Animation Program: Kiwi; Singles; Work; Something Left, Something Taken; Bottle
Automorphosis
The Chicano Wave
Corner Plot
Deep Down
If a Tree Falls
Imaginary Circumstances
It’s About You John Mellencamp
Kids with Cameras
The Lottery
Louder Than a Bomb
Make Believe
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
New Frontier - Sustainable Ranching in the American West
Niger 66
No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson
One Lucky Elephant
Poster Girl
We Still Live Here

November 7–11: Quito

During the first day, Stanley and I met to design our presentation and create a strategy, depending on the audiences we had listed in our itinerary. We prepared a presentation based on Freedom Riders, and selected three to four clips to illustrate different concepts and ideas relating to the subject matter and the documentary storytelling techniques and devices utilized in the film.
Since we had very little information about the target audience and expectations from the different groups, this presentation was adjusted and took different forms once we hit the field. Although we had a plan, we decided to adjust according to the audience’s interests and questions. In the end this worked out really well and most presentations felt very organic and useful to the audiences we were addressing.

In broad strokes these are the different issues we prepared to discuss in our presentation:

  1. The Civil Rights Movement in the United States as a context for Freedom Riders
  2. The creative process and discussion of some of the choices Stanley made in Freedom Riders
    • The effect of using the voices of the characters instead of an omnipresent narrator to tell the story
    • How to create a very cinematic experience to engage the viewer from the onset. The importance of style and very strong visuals, music, and sound effects to immerse the audience in the right mood and rhythm for the story.
  3. Choosing and finding the right elements to tell the story: Archival footage, photographs, animated maps, reenactments, etc.
    • Brainstorming sessions, creating a wish list of materials
    • Research process for finding the archival material
    • Criteria for selecting the photographs: What does a picture reveal?
    • How to shoot the photographs to tell the story with just a series of images, or just one image.
    • When and how to shoot reenactments. Issues of veracity when using reenactments: How do we make sure we’re not misleading the audience?
  4. Interviewing techniques
    • Selecting the subjects for interviews
    • Securing interviews
    • How to make the subject feel comfortable and relaxed to tell their story
    • How to maximize the emotional impact of an interview, i.e. Tell me what you saw, what you heard, how it sounded, vs. tell me what happened
    • Making sure the answers the subjects are giving will be usable in the editing room—How does the subject’s answer fit within the context of the whole story we’re trying to tell?
  5. Editing, music, and post-production
    • The importance of a script for shooting and editing
    • Collaboration with the editor
    • Collaboration with the composer
    • Working with the graphic designers
  6. Social impact of the documentary
    • The historic importance of the documentary, not only to learn about the past, but also to put our present into context.
    • The documentary as an organizing tool today

We planned on doing this presentation as a dialogue between the two of us and the audience. It worked like that in the first few universities, but later, due to the quality of the interpreter (or the lack of interpreter), I became the interpreter by default. This ended up being good because by then, I knew all the possible questions and answers, so I was able to translate very quickly and efficiently, which contributed to making the discussions more dynamic and fluid.

In the evening of our first day, we met for dinner with the Embassy’s cultural affairs program officer, Lisa Sweraski, who gave us an overview and answered our questions about the program.
On our second day, Program Specialist Elizabeth Serrano picked us up in the morning for our first presentation at the Universidad de las Americas. We spoke to a group of approximately 50 students from the Facultad de Comunicación Social. Most of them were journalism majors and their questions were mostly geared towards the issues raised by the film, and the idea of documentary filmmaking as journalism. This was a very dynamic group that seemed to be deeply interested in the subject matter, and displayed some knowledge about the racial struggles of the ’60s in the U.S.

In the afternoon, we went to the U.S. Embassy and had lunch with Chargé d’Affairs Timothy Zuñiga-Brown and Public Affairs Officers Wesley Carrington and Lisa Sweraski.

Following our lunch, we spent three hours in press interviews with the Embassy’s press department and its radio program Reportaje. The Embassy also produced a beautiful video press release posted on YouTube. We also had interviews with Revista Vanguradia (Magazine), and the “Familia” section of the El Comercio newspaper.

In the evening, we attended the opening gala of the American Documentary Showcase at Centro Cultural Ocho y Medio, and screening of Freedom Riders, followed by a 30-minute Q&A with Stanley, who fielded questions about a range of topics, from the historic value of documentary to specifics about the filmmaking craft. Although the organizers at the venue had not planned for a post-screening Q&A, Stanley insisted on including this very important part of the program.

On our third day, we got off to an early start, with a 7:00 a.m. interview on Radio Sucesos. We found out as we were in the studio that this was also a TV show!

In the afternoon, we were picked up by Jennifer Lawson, outreach officer at the US Embassy, to go to the Universidad Católica del Ecuador for a workshop with approximately 75 communication students. Most of them were part of the journalism or audiovisual majors. When we arrived we were greeted by the head of the school, Lourdes Pérez Villarreal.

The next two days, we had morning and afternoon sessions at several universities. The audience at the Central University was our most difficult; it was very hard to get any response from them, and even though we asked at the beginning of each session what their background and majors were, we never got a true sense of whom we were speaking to. In addition, we ended up with a “rogue” interpreter, who started expressing his own opinions as opposed to translating! This is when I became the interpreter. However, up to this point, we were very pleased with the quality of translation.

On our last day in Quito, we spoke to filmmaking students at Instituto Superior Tecnológico de Artes Visuales de Quito (IAVQ) in the morning and to advanced documentary students at INCINE, an elite film school in Quito. We added to our presentations an animated sequence from Stanley’s film Wounded Knee because we felt it was interesting to show a film focusing on our Native American population in a country like Ecuador, where the majority of the population is indigenous, and at the same time film students would appreciate the technical aspects of producing an animated segment for a documentary. Although the sequence was not translated into Spanish, the reaction of the students was very emotional, thus showing the power of the animation as a cinematic tool in connecting the audience to the subject matter.

November 11–14: Imbabura Valley, Chota Valley

During the weekend, we traveled with Embassy representatives to the Imbabura Valley and the Chota Valley, where we met Ecuadorian filmmaker Pablo Palacios as he was shooting his documentary about three Afro-Ecuadorian women farmers. There, we were able to learn more about this community and about the work of a renowned Ecuadorian filmmaker.

November 14–15: Coca

We traveled to Coca, which is located in the Ecuadorian Amazon, for an evening screening and discussion of Freedom Riders in a state-of-the-art multiplex. This program was hosted by the Fundación Alejandro Labaka and the Centro Cultural de Coca and attendees included some special invitees.

November 16–18: Guayaquil

In Guayaquil we had two presentations at Universidad Casa Grande and Universidad Católica. Our host from the Consulate was Public Affairs Officer Mark Kendrick. We also had a screening of Freedom Riders at MAAC Cine Guayaquil run by Ocho y Medio.

Final Thoughts

Being a part of this cultural delegation to Ecuador has reaffirmed my belief in the power of film as a universal language that allows us to find a common ground that can make an impact on the global stage. I appreciate the US State Department and the University Film and Video Association for making this program possible; I believe it is an important tool in forging positive relations that can translate into shared visions of the world, which in turn can help find more diplomatic solutions to many of our interactions with other nations. I would like to thank the Embassy staff in Quito and the Consulate staff in Guayaquil for organizing such a diverse and interesting program and for ensuring that every aspect of this experience was positive. They were all very helpful, offered a lot of knowledge and insight about Ecuador, and were very fun to be with.

Overall, our Showcase experience was very successful, varied, and diverse. Personally I felt that my experience, knowledge, and background in contemporary independent filmmaking could have been used a little bit better if I had more clarity on my role as delegate expert prior to the experience, and if the Embassy and the organizations hosting us had a better idea of my background and how it could be useful for their constituencies.