The past 72 hours has seen our second film, When the Village was Heard for the CBT Vietnam project erupt with views, shares and support from around the world; and, it’s been an exciting thing to witness as a filmmaker. I suppose it’s a bit like watching your kid leave home and head off to college. You’re not really sure what people will make of your son or daughter; whether it’ll stand out and make you proud, or if it will simply go out and slip into the crowds of videos that make up YouTube. (A recent stat says that 48 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute - nearly eight years of content every day!!)
With this second video, we really tried to make the focus less about the Canadian/Vietnamese group delivering the training, and more about the women telling their story in their own words. As Dao language is their native tongue, it made sense to do as many of the interviews with the women in Dao as possible, sometimes creating the need to double translate from English to Vietnamese to Dao. A big thank you has to go Ly Lo May who spent several hours going through the video in the editing room (which in this film’s case, happened to be various coffee shops in Hanoi), helping translate the Dao language into English.
Hearing the women speak in their own language, confidently and comfortably, is something that, as a filmmaker, I’m most proud of with this new video. We took great strides to make sure the translations were accurate, and it’s a fascinating language to listen to - very different than Vietnamese or other South Asian languages. Dao is an oral language, one that cannot be written on paper, and it has become something that I’d like to pretend that I’m unintentionally learning, after watching and listening to the footage for hours upon hours.
I lived in Hanoi for three months this past spring where the majority of this video was edited. Living in the Old Quarter of Hanoi in a hotel room without A/C was an experience I’ll never forget, and I have many thanks for the cool floor tiles, and the electric fan that saved my life and kept the MacBook Pro alive and running fine.
Cutting a video down from the hours and hours of raw content into its current length is never an easy task, and like the first video, there were a lot of ideas and issues to get across in a six-minute piece. The goal for this video was to show the progress that has been made as a result of the project training through the eyes of the Dao women. We also wanted to show the great risks that the women are taking in order to build tourism in their village. Chao Ta May, for example, has invested 75 million Vietnamese dong, roughly $3700 USD to make improvements to her homestay. If tourism dries up, she and her family have a very real problem.
Topics such as the successes of the temporary community market and how it’s providing a place for the elderly women to sell were important to showcase. Of course we also wanted to feature the tour operators meeting the Dao women in Sapa, the cooperation between the government, private organizations and Capilano University and Hanoi OpenUniversity. And we wanted to set up how training is beginning to take shape in the neighboring Black H’mong community of Lao Chai.
This last week has been an exciting one. And as we approach 1000 hits, I have a lot of people to thank. Bill Thumm, probably first and foremost, for thinking of me and putting me in touch with Chris Bottril and Chris Carnovale in a last minute meeting to have a videographer film what became When the Tourists Come. Last year’s video had us borrowing a lot of camera equipment from the Bosa Centre for Film and Animation on incredible short notice (72 hours!!) Chris Curran-Dorsano and the rest of the studio team did a great job in hooking us up with gear, and I was very happy to be able to bring it back in one piece.. Sorry about the mud guys.
Many thanks need to go to the team members on the each of the project trips I’ve been a part of now (three so far!). Helping schlepp gear around Hanoi and in the villages, rounding up interviewees and simply working out logistics to make my job easier are all big reasons for the videos turning out the way they do. And it’s that unseen help that is so important in this style of small-unit documentary filmmaking. And a shout-out to Capri Studios and composer Luke Dunn for the great work on the original music created specifically for this video.
Thank you to the PATA Foundation, the generosity of whom is now being seen all around the world.
Thank you to the PATA Foundation, the generosity of whom is now being seen all around the world.
Thanks also have to go to the women themselves, for allowing me into their homes and to interview them on camera. They are fantastic, and when you put them in front of the camera and attach the mic to their lapels, they have the same kind of nervousness and pre-interview jitters as anyone else. But they did a great job of speaking on camera, better than many English-speaking interviewees I’ve interviewed here in Canada.
To get the kind of international exposure in making videos such as these, and to be able to travel and see another side of the world and it’s unique and remarkable culture, is something that has absolutely changed my perspective.
To get to know and befriend the Dao women, to be able to go inside their homes and document their incredible stories has been a tremendous privilege, and an absolute pleasure to be a part of. It’s hard work. Mentally, physically and psychologically challenging. You’re in a place where extreme poverty is all around you, and it’s something you absolutely must be able to adapt to.
But I have no regrets in being a part of these videos and I can only hope that there are more projects like these around the corner. More stories to be told. More long days of editing in foreign countries in air-conditioning-less hotels.
It’s been a fantastic project to be a part of, and I hope people enjoy the videos and find themselves wanting to learn more about what’s going on in the CBT Vietnam universe. Thanks again for joining us over the last 72 hours, as we launch this video, and share what so many have been a part of.
Cheers,
Kyle
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