Cysfilm

Vancouver

Vancouver, come see my movie!

tickets: http://www.viff.org/tixSYS/2010/xslguide/eventnote.php?EventNumber=0917

Printing

Made all these posters and postcards for the Vancouver premiere through psprint. I don’t do much printing but their prices seemed reasonable and the quality is fine. I like making stuff like this, it’s so tangible.

Interview with Dr. Kim Yi Dionne: Part 1 of 5

Dr. Kim Yi Dionne is a political scientist with expertise on Malawi who helped me pull the kinks out of Bush League. The film isn’t about HIV/AIDS but it does touch on it and other complex subjects so it was great to have a real pro look the film over in case there was an error. Among the many interesting things I learned while reading her research was a survey she did among rural Malawians about their development priorities. Here are the results of the survey:

In a survey of 1259 rural villagers in Rumphi district, villagers ranked their preferences with respect to development and health in the following order:

1. Clean Water

2. Agricultural Development

3. Health Services

4. Education

5. HIV/AIDS services

The reason this interests me so much is because I think most of our policy makers would presume that HIV/AIDS is at the top. We’ve got our hearts in the right place and the money too, but I really wonder about the data that guides the whole thing.

Bush League Facebook group

For all the facebookers out there, please join the Bush League group:

https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=146642635369584

Interview with Dr. Kim Dionne: part 2 of 5

Interview with Dr. Kim Yi Dionne: part 3 of 5

If I could go back in time and give myself some advice before shooting Bush League I would say, “Take the traditional system of authority (chiefs, subchiefs, village headman etc.) seriously because when the soccer games come to a halt and the imported rules of the game stop working, it’s that system that’s going to kick in, that’s what you’ll actually be filming, that’s what you’re seeing.”

For Wednesday Dr. Kim Yi Dionne reflects on the importance of traditional systems in many sub-Saharan nations:

Interview with Dr. Kim Dionne: part 4 of 5

Interview with Dr. Kim Yi Dionne: Part 5 of 5

Quick, imagine you’re a rural Malawian and put this list of development priorities in order, 1 being the most important to you and 5 the least important to you:

Agricultural Development

Education

HIV/AIDS services

Clean Water

Health Services

Bush League premieres in a week and a half so I wanted to take this week to post an interview I did recently with Dr. Kim Yi Dionne. Kim is a political scientist with a research background in Malawi who reviewed Bush League for accuracy during post production. In reading her work I was struck by the results of a survey she did of rural Malawian’s development priorities. The survey results look very simple, it’s just a short list of what the people in that region would prefer in terms of money/resources spent on development. Here are the actual results – see how you guessed.

In a survey of 1259 rural villagers in Rumphi district, villagers ranked their preferences with respect to development and health in the following order:

1. Clean Water

2. Agricultural Development

3. Health Services

4. Education

5. HIV/AIDS services

How did you do? See anything unexpected? Where did you rank HIV/AIDS services?

HIV/AIDS services were fifth? How many of us could have guessed that HIV/AIDS would be last? So what’s going on? Shouldn’t they be first?

To shed some light on this I’ll be posting a five-part interview with Kim on the facebook/Bush League group page and here over the next five days that looks at this. I hope you’ll find these clips interesting both as an insight on Malawi but perhaps equally so – as a reflection of ourselves.

For today I’m posting a second short clip from an interview with the Subchief of Zolokere (he’s the highest authority in the village where Bush League was filmed) and this will start us with some insights into the extreme end of the conversation –  the HIV/AIDS conspiracy theory.

Subchief Moses Khunga from Zolokere, Malawi, January 2007

Dr. Kim Yi Dionne at UCLA, June 2010

Things to Love: This Video

Off Kim Yi Dionne’s gmail/buzz stream. Congolese-born, Belgian-raised rapper/singer. Oroma Elewa:

Pravesh Gurung

Good news from Pravesh Gurung my old classmate from CalArts. The project he’s on in Bollywood just released it’s first trailer:

It’s amazing. Whether you like this kind of thing or not you have to admire the scale that Bollywood achieves. It’s always epic, shamelessly nostalgic story telling. Maybe most importantly, it’s fun too.. Pravesh’s brother by the way is the perhaps the most talked about young fashion designer around – Prabal Gurung. Pravesh congrats and good luck!