As I've been writing posts for this blog, I realized that I've focused on only a few important events while neglecting to give a detailed account of what we've actually been doing. Here I'll try to fill you in on a couple of the details.
Our first couple of days in Rwinkwavu were, unfortunately, limited in productivity because of the weather. It poured each day, and because the rainy season wasn't due for another month, we were unprepared. This did give us a chance to finish planning out the story of our film (a bit late, I know), but it set us rather behind our schedule. In the early mornings and late afternoons we had the chance to shoot some b-roll, but we couldn't film any actual soccer, since the fields were swamped, and interviews were also ruled out since they all had to be shot outside. We did on Friday try to film some stock footage in the rain, but this ended badly. What began as a light drizzle became a downpour, so we ended without any footage whatsoever. Worse, when we reached the top of the hill we were climbing after an hour-long walk, I took out my GlideCam to film some steady motion shots only to find that the top of the GlideCam had fallen off somewhere on the walk. We searched and searched but were unable to find it. I was quite disappointed, since this was a fairly expensive, fancy piece of equipment which I had barely had the chance to use, and which would have been extremely useful later in production.
Once the daily rains stopped several days into our trip, we were able to meet with and interview Coach Desire as well as Jean Felix, although I've written about that earlier. In the evenings we visited the ruins of the old Belgian stadium, destroyed during the genocide, to film the kids who play there every day. We also spent some time trying to find a child who we could follow for a day, a kid who would be, in a sense, the protagonist of the documentary. We had planned to film the child as he went about his daily routine, in which soccer provided perhaps the only escape from an otherwise fairly difficult life, and to interview him about his life and his ideas about soccer. We tried to find a kid on our own on Friday, but ultimately the child we found lived in a village too far away, and, and since our translator had left early for Kigali where she would spend the weekend, it was difficult to get our intent across to the kid's family. The child we found also didn't reflect a typical young boy from Rwinkwavu, since his family was wealthier than most (although still extremely poor by Western standards).
This led to a bit of a moral problem for us, since we felt very uncomfortable deciding not to follow a kid simply because he wasn't as impoverished as many of his friends, but in the end we chose to look for a different child. Jean Felix helped us to find another kid (pictured below), which thankfully spared us more of the awkward, cross-cultural exchanges that had characterized our first attempt. I'll write more about the new kid in a later post.
The photo of the boy Jean Felix found:
And another one of the ruined Belgian stadium:
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