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About
Rencontrer
Rencontrer is composed of six
5-minute pieces wherein we follow each character for one
day as they live their daily lives. All characters
are African
immigrants or refugees living in West Philadelphia. Living in America
is often associated with fulfilling one's dreams and finding
opportunities,
sending dollars multiplied many fold to native currencies - family
members eagerly awaiting each and every transmission as
if it were a life line,
and in many cases it is. We traverse various layers and cultures
as we allow the
camera to initmately capture the daily
rhythms and routines of their new homeland. The 5-minute
pieces screened individually,
preceding feature-length African Films as part of Reel Voices' Africa
Film Series, a collaboration with WYBE-TV, Scribe Video
Center and International
House, which began in December 2003 and runs through May 2004.
The
structure of Rencontrer is essentially made of discrete 5-minute pieces,
each as if it were its own short story unrelated to the other five.
The
stories are unique to each character's experiences and may resonate with
or add to others told elsewhere in the overall piece; no pre-planned
threads or suggestions of topics were made before or during filming.
It
was left entirely to the character's passions and sentiments regarding
their own experiences as Africans in Americal. There are meetings between
characters that connects the pieces; for example, as we follow Hadja
(the
first subject), Tiguida (the second subject) arrives for a visit. When
Tiguida leaves the Hadja's home, our story continues with Tiguida.
The
next piece on Tiguida then begins and at the conclusion of her piece,
a connection with Dieneba is made, our next subject, which leads us
to
follow her and so on; hence the name Rencontrer. Rencontrer was shot
in 8 days during November 2003 and was funded in part by a grant
from Philadelphia
Stories,a project of WYBE-TV35, Philadelphia.
About the Filmmaker - Filmon Mebrahtu
Filmon Mebrahtu is an independent filmmaker whose Stop Killing Taxi
Drivers, an 8-minute cinema verite documentary on a demonstration
by African drivers, aired on WYBE, WHYY, screened at the 2002 Philadelphia
Festival of Independents and at the 2003 Northwest Festival of African
Cinema. He is currently in production of a one-hour documentary on the
adjustment of 3 Sudanese young men to life in Philadelphia, an ITVS project
and joint production with WYBE. Filmon Mebrahtu, from the Eastern African
country of Eritrea, produces documentaries with one goal in mind; to capture
stories of immigrant communities in Philadelphia with the purpose of documenting
and expressing their diverse cultural experiences. Too often, we hear
the voices of these communities as told and retold by faces and words
other than their own. Their depiction is at the mercy of content producers
whose goals and ambitions are wildly divergent from these immigrant communities.
These African immigrant stories remains powerful only if the communities
themselves tell their stories in their own words, and are allowed to participate
in the creation of the media; this is Filmon's approach to making his
documentaries. Filmon is the founder and Executive Director of Reel Voices,
a non-profit 501.c.3 organization.
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