The first week

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:

Jean Felix

Shortly after meeting with Desire the first time, a man named Mbuyi Jean Felix arrived in Rwinkwavu.  We had contacted him before coming, since I had met him the first time I was in Rwanda and he had been extremely helpful.  He shared his knowledge about the region with us, and helped us to arrange meetings which, though essential for the film, were difficult for us to organize because of the cultural barrier.  We scheduled an interview with him as well, but more on that later.  My only worry was that Jean Felix would try to arrange things that we didn't want, due both to the inevitable miscommunications which would occur, and to his own ideas about what our film should cover.  This has been a frequent problem so far: people have often interpreted our project as a chance for them to get aid from a potential Western audience, so they choose to talk about their material needs rather than whatever we ask them about.


In our interview last Saturday with Jean Felix, we touched on a number of key topics for the film.  He discussed the role of soccer for the country, both past an present: he talked about how soccer helped the country to recover after the genocide, and how to this day it helps kids develop both physically and mentally.  I tried to get him to discuss the role of soccer in the lives of girls, knowing that soccer is used to promote gender equality in this fairly sexist society, but when he began talking about how soccer gave him a chance to educate girls about the dangers of having sex, I abandoned that thread.  He did, however, provide an interesting insight into Rwandan sexism when he explained that many parents refuse to let their daughters play soccer with boys in fear that they would lose their virginity.  Although at times the interview dragged on, such as when he felt compelled to detail his successes in school, or felt uncomfortable, as when he said that before the benevolent European colonialists arrived, Rwandans "were living like animals," Jean Felix provided insights useful both for us and the film about Rwanda's culture and the role of football in that culture.


Our meeting with Jean Felix also brought up a much larger question in our film: that of its 'message,' or purpose.  After discussing the extreme poverty of the region with Jean Felix, Jules wanted to create a documentary which would not only reveal this poverty, but which would appeal to people to actually do something about it.  I wanted to create a film which, though still exposing the poverty which would be impossible to conceal, would focus instead on the portrayal of Rwandan culture through our storyline and through soccer.  This led to questions, perhaps still unresolved, about the goal of our film: did we want to make a documentary to help these people, or simply to show the culture through our perspective?


An image of Jean Felix:

The Translator

As I (Caleb) was writing this post, I realized that I forgot to mention that three years ago I had already traveled to Rwanda with a woman named Edwina Portocarrero and had the idea for this project.  Not until now, however, have I been able to return (this time with Jules) to work again on the film.  Now, back to the post.

Several days into our stay in Rwinkwavu, we met with our translator, a schoolteacher from Kigali.  She seemed very helpful at first, as we walked into a village where I thought we could find Desire, a man I remembered as the coach of the local soccer team.  She even got the group of children who were following  us to sing songs which we'll use as part of the soundtrack.  

When we met with Desire, we set up an interview for the next friday at the ruins of an old Belgian stadium where the local kids still play every day after school.  It was during that interview that I realized that we would need to find a new translator.  She frequently couldn't understand the questions I was asking, and ultimately the entire interview went awfully and we had to schedule a new one (which starts in half an hour).  

To be fair, though, the interview's failure wasn't completely her fault.  Desire himself had little interest in answering the questions, and instead he wanted to talk about how he needed money for jerseys and shoes for the team.  I was unable to get any information about his own life, or what he thought about soccer, even though I remembered some very interesting details from when I had talked to him three years earlier.  I'll write more about him after our second interview later today.

An image of the coach Desire:

  

Anyway, I've been searching for a new interpreter, but so far I've been unable to find one, and it looks like we might be stuck with our current translator for the rest of our stay here.  Perhaps we could incorporate this problem into our film, and weave it into the storyline about the difficulties in making the documentary itself.  I'll post more about Desire, the translator, and our progress later, but now we have to go make a second attempt at the interview.

Arrival in Rwinkwavu

On the 15th of August we took a car through the Rwandan countryside from Kigali to Rwinkwavu, a dry region in the impoverished southeast of the nation.  The change from the city, which has developed strikingly in the past three years since I was last here, to the gorgeous but destitute country was dramatic.  

Once we arrived, we began with taking some stock footage of the region, footage that we hope will simultaneously reveal both the incredible beauty and the extreme poverty of Rwinkwavu while also exploring various aspects of Rwandan culture and the central theme of soccer.  We took most of this footage simply on the streets of the villages, capturing colorfully dressed people on their way to the fields, people driving rusty bikes laden with massive cartons of bananas or sticks or water, and the many small children gathering around us to wonder at these strange people wearing strange clothes and carrying strange tools.  That's one of the most shocking aspects of any trip to Rwanda: the multitudes of dusty, emaciated kids shouting 'mazungu!' (Kinyarwanda for white man) at us and following us wherever we go, practicing their limited English and French on us, and laughing at our strangeness.

Here's a photo of two kids, scared of us but still curious

and another one of a crowd of kids fascinated by me with a camera and tripod

The first days

Jules and I (Caleb) have been meaning to start this blog for some time, but we've been busy working on the documentary and didn't get around to it until earlier today.  The next few posts will summarize what we've been doing up till now, to keep you up to date.  This one is about the first days we spent in Rwanda.

We arrived in Kigali, Rwanda on the 14th of August.  Flying over Rwanda at night was incredible, since the country was completely dark. As I got off the plane at the Kigali International Airport, I smelled Africa in the air.  There's something about it, maybe the dust or the smoke from the small fires across the country, or even just the diesel fuel, that imparts an beautifully unforgettable scent.  It was Jules's first time in Africa, but I don't doubt that he'll come to remember the smell as I do.

In Kigali we worked mostly on pre-production, planning out different possible outlines for our film, which we had meant to do before going.  Unfortunately, Jules was on vacation in Greece and I was enjoying the sun on Nantucket, so we hadn't gotten around to it.  We had the chance to visit the Genocide Memorial Centre, which was very revealing of Rwanda's past and present, and at the same time was one of the most poignant places I've ever been.  We also prepared and tested some of the new equipment we had bought, such as our Glidecam 2000 Pro (an image stabilizer), which we spent ages balancing.  The other eventful aspect of our short stay in Kigali was that Jules overdosed hugely on his malarone pills (a drug to fight medicine) when he accidentally took the curative form of the drug, which is intended only for those who already have the disease.  His resulting illness lasted for days.

That's all for now; the next post will deal with our arrival in Rwinkwavu and the beginning of the production.

The Story

Soccer in Rwanda is a short documentary film project currently in production by Caleb Murray-Bozeman and Jules Fletcher Le Masson.  We wanted to make a film that would explore Rwandan society, and we found that soccer provided the most easily accessible window into this very different culture.  

According to our current plan (which is very much subject to change!), our documentary follows a young child who lives in Rwinkwavu, one of the poorest regions of the country, during a typical day.  In a life marked by extreme poverty, soccer becomes a way to escape daily hardship, and, more simply, a way to have fun.  Through interviews with other characters ranging from kids playing on a club team to their coach to the soccer commissioner for the entire country, our film explores other aspects of the role that soccer plays in Rwanda.  It looks at how soccer was used to help overcome ethnic tensions after the 1994 genocide, and at how it is used to help overcome gender inequality.  Ultimately, we hope that our film will reveal the hope that soccer represents in this country.

Our documentary blends this story line about soccer and Rwandan culture with the story of our own trip in Rwinkwavu.  It follows the ups and downs of the creation of this film, and it examines the experience of being a stranger in a completely different society.

We plan to update this blog regularly with news and stories about our project, so you can expect to hear from us soon!