Bailey
The show was a process of getting stories out of my own head and into someone else’s. After watching (and re-watching), mapping, translating, researching, editing, subtitling, music-ing, and tweaking three families’ stories for 4 weeks, they were completely ingrained in my brain and I had no way to tell if they still made sense. At the Public Library last Monday the stories of Nubia, Claudia, and Mery left my brain and appeared on the big screen. There they were, telling their stories. And people understood. They followed the plot, identified with the characters. “I loved your videos!” everyone said. “I want to visit La Cruz now!” “What an amazing story!”
But the more important arena was to come one week later when I brought the videos to the families. The most important moment was when they watched my work for the first time. I sat there hoping they recognized themselves, heard their familiar story instead of my own re-styling or re-imagining of their history. Tears came to eyes. Hugs and besitos were given. And at last I felt that I had achieved what needed to be achieved: the story had gotten out of my head, through an audience, and was received once again by the person who told it.
Browne
I don't get stage fright. I don't get nervous reading in front of large crowds, or, for that matter, presenting my own work.
So then why is it that during our documentary screening, seconds before my video was to be played, I started sweating uncontrollably? Why is it that my heart skipped one, or four, beats, as I awaited the premier of my documentary? This wasn't stage fright, per say; my back was to the crowd as I sat on the edge of my seat in the front row. This was a different kind of stage fright, a feeling that was causing my heart to nearly explode. It was a fear of the reception of my video.
Rosmira had opened her home, heart, and past to me. She had told me of her moments of complete and utter terror, despair, and loneliness, and of moments of hope and strength. She had given me her story with open arms to take from her home at the highest point of the mountain and trusted me to share it. Had I effectively told the story she wanted to be told?
As Rosmira began to describe how she constructed her house, images of the inside of her home flashed on screen, as simultaneous gasps swept over the crowd. I had watched this segment over and over again while editing it countless times, so it had little effect on me. To the audience, however, the images simply transformed her words into reality. They were able to see the tied-together sticks that formed the shape of the roof, the dirt floor covered with carpet scraps, the dilapidated state of the house. The images spoke for themselves.
This reaction of the crowd to the part of my video that was, to me, the most important, completely erased my previous concerns. I had no idea that these images would generate such a strong response, but they were able to show the audience the family's living conditions and difficulties that they had faced. I was then able to sit back in my seat and listen to Rosmira tell her story.
Elysia
Our show on Monday was the first time that I'd shown my video to anyone outside our group, or my host family. I was nervous, but also interested, to hear their opinions - criticisms and compliments alike. Getting to watch people while they watched my video was a really unique experience. I got to see their facial expressions, their reactions to various parts of my video. It was a little nervewracking being right there, but I think it prepared me to do the same with Orfilia, whose story is the focus of my video. Getting feedback on my work was incredibly helpful, especially in regards to presentation of Medellín Solidaria, and of the neighborhood.
Getting to show an audience who is so aware of, and so much a part of, this city was really a fantastic experience, one that made me consider other points of view in constructing these videos.
Jack
On Monday, I was nervous. Nervous that my video wouldn’t depict the city of Medellín like the Paisa’s wanted it to. Nervous that it would come across as “yet another sob story”. Nervous that the Duque León family’s perseverance and love, what I wanted to portray, would be drowned by the emotional power of the struggles the family has endured. We broke off to set up our videos on our laptops, and the first group that approached mine was a mother and her two daughters. They put on the headphones and pressed play. It was a weird feeling, standing idly by watching people view something I had put so much time into. With about a minute left, I saw the mom reach up and wipe a tear from her eyes. All my fears crept back. I assumed she couldn’t get past the hardships, and that the essence of the family was getting lost. When the video ended, the mom took off the headphones and looked up at me, a smile on her face and water welled up in her eyes. I made a comment about how sad everything was that they had gone through, but she corrected me. She said she was crying because the love they had for each other was so beautiful. No single sentence could have smothered my fears and doubts like that one did. I smiled and thanked her with a hug. They asked me about the process, and then left as quickly as they had came. I sat down, released a sigh of relief, and smiled to myself, finally proud of what I had done.
Kate
It was time to take a conversation with Tam, and turn it into a legible presentation. As Monday evening’s event approached, anxiety crept up on me. The order of events would include a brief break from screening videos. A brief reflection from Kate, the English-speaking, notoriously long-winded and occasionally convoluted, thinker and speaker. I would present in Spanish. I hoped to share some crisscrossing considerations about displacement, community development, and urban planning. And I hoped to be coherent. Maybe this time I could dodge speaking in abstractions, outrun seeming vague. I had personal experiences and more slippery musings to share. I wanted to be accessible to my audience—a Spanish speaking audience. I wanted to be understood. I wanted people to like what I had to say. So with a grimace on my face, and maybe in my heart, I sat down to start writing. And immediately paused. Double-click Chrome. Command+Shift+N. New window open. Type “w.” www.wordreference.com/English_Spanish_Dictionary.asp is the first link that appears—naturally. Enter. How do you translate “deliverables.”
And therein laid the problem, and my story.
[Read what I wrote here: link]
Nicholas
The show this past August 5th was a little strange for me, personally, because my documentary wasn’t complete, and the whole event sort of took me by surprise, to be honest. I had been going into the field essentially every work-day, and I hadn’t had much time to edit or trim down the video. As such, I walked into the event knowing that I wasn’t going to present my video and praying that whoever was going to watch my video during the laptop session could handle standing in one place for 20 minutes (that’s how long it was at the time). It was not edited to my standards, the music selections were placeholders, and overall I was simply not impressed with my work and wasn’t expecting anybody else to be. Regardless of my discomfort with my video, I thoroughly enjoyed the work of my peers. The ones I saw were very well done, and I imagine that the others, for which we didn’t have time to display on the big screen, were just as polished.
So Vicki and Margarita were the two people that were lucky enough to watch my video. A compañera saw some of it, but quickly grew bored and left (HA-I was amused by this, because at this point, I think I may have done the same if I had been in her position). It’s not that the content was boring; I had essentially completed the story boarding aspect so it was cohesive in that respect. However, there was no interesting footage, no cool scenery to look at or stories like the ones being told in the videos of my peers. This video was simply explaining what Medellín Solidaria is. But, I thought to myself, why couldn’t I make it just is as interesting? I could spice it up. And now that it’s essentially done, I believe I did (thank you to that compañera). So Vicki and Margarita actually thoroughly enjoyed it – I don’t think they desperately needed the B-Footage to keep their interest, but I know that it would have helped – and commented on how hard it was going to be, for me, to cut information, because all of it seemed important! What a compliment! I had cut down from almost 5 hours of footage and almost 8 or 9 different interviews… As of now, I’ve composed 1/3 of the music that is in the documentary, and I’ve created a few animations to accompany some dialogue, to spice things up a bit. All in all, the show was a good learning experience for me, and in the end I’m glad that I had showed my work. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to improve it in the way that I did.
Nikita
I knew I was coming to Colombia to interview families and desplazadas, people who have had to uproot their lives, and start over again in these mountains of Medellín. Through this process, I knew that I would be learning about their lives. What I could not have foreseen is that I would be creating intimate relationships with the people I interview, to a point where they have come to know about my life and my stories, as well. I chose to document Maria Herlinda Uran Uran’s story because I felt I could do it justice. The first time, I was unsure of my Spanish, of how to hold the camera without my hands shaking, of how to ask the questions that were supposed to encompass one's life. Yet, she opened her home and her heart to me time and time again. After the hours and weeks I had spent with her, I felt as if I could at least attempt to capture the essence of her story. This choice was not hard for me because she chose me, as well. She chose to sit down, long after the camera stopped recording, to ask about my day, my time in Colombia, my culture, my family, and my life back home. She and her sons welcomed me like an old friend, and I entered her home not thinking about an interview process or what angle I should record from or what questions I should ask. Maria allowed me to come, and sit, and listen, and be with her family. In the end, Maria had multiple stories I wish I could document, but the story I wanted people to see was the story of a mother who has gone through the greatest of tragedies, but still found the strength and determination to move forward for the sake of her children. Her spirit inspired me, and that is something I hoped to capture, no matter which story is documented. I did not know how I was going to express this sentiment to a large audience due to my stage fright, let alone express it in Spanish. Yet, after the showing, various Colombians told me they laughed or they cried, or they simply enjoyed our films. It was in this moment that I realized these stories we are documenting have the power to cross cultural and linguistic boundaries, and to affect people living as close as Medellín, and as far away as my hometown. I am eternally grateful to have met and come to know her, and I hope to continue listening to Maria’s story long after I leave Colombia.
Ryan
From fourth grade until my second year of high school, I used to perform magic. I was a cardholding member of the Society of Young Magicians (the youth division of, as they tell you early on, the world's oldest magic organization), and the club met every Saturday from 2 to 4 p.m. at an old Methodist church that let us use their stage. After we learned a new closeup trick or performance technique, we would practice our stage routines; mine started with an empty box and tube, from which I would—magically—produce a stream of blue and yellow silk handkerchiefs. Then I'd blend them together, making, obviously, a giant green one, and later, fuse a deck of cards onto it.
I started thinking about these magical metamorphoses after the Medellín Mi Hogar theater show last Monday, where we presented our documentaries and reflected about the process of creating them. Storytelling, I realized, is inherently a process of transformation. And not just one transformation—a story undergoes constant change as it passes from one narrator to another, from one listener to the next. Monday's theater show was the result of at least three transformations: From the families we interviewed to us, from our understanding of the original footage to an edited video, and from the edited video to a public audience at the show.
These changes are inevitable; from the words we choose to speak to the video clips we choose to cut, every element of storytelling requires making a decision. But I think that, as intermediary storytellers—as the ones who collate and adapt others' stories for wider audiences—we should be especially aware of the transformations we're involved in and can control. To outsiders, it seems like we're illusionists, of some sort; we're shaping something to evoke some reaction from an audience.
Because really, the changes that stories undergo are kind of magical. How is a five minute documentary produced from three hours of footage, much less a family's life story? We could step backwards through the process, look at our notes, press command-Z until our fingers hurt, but if we were to start over again from scratch, would we end up with the same result? Would it be remotely similar?
I don't ask these questions to second-guess our videos, which I truly think are well-made and moving, but only to wonder about the process of transformation within storytelling, and because they're questions I'd like to think more about in the future as I share more stories. It's a necessary procedure; few spectators would care to sit through hours of raw interview material, but, like any kind of art, it's inescapably arbitrary and improvisatory. As I discovered on those Saturday afternoons years ago, despite months of practice, our acts were never perfect; at some point, we always ended up ad libbing, and our performances could never be exactly the same every time.
The longest official game of telephone—where a phrase is whispered from one participant to the next—involved 1,330 children, but every story we tell is the continuation of an eternal game of telephone. Stories change. Our role in their lifespan is fleeting, but our influence over them is something we should always consider.
Vaib
After the amount of effort we put into preparing out videos, Monday's show seemed like it was going to be a breeze. As an addition to my video on Doña Lolita, I gave a short speech on the impact of my time interviewing her, similar to my previous blog post. However, while these displays about work went by smoothly (sure, there were a few technical difficulties), I don't think I could prepare for the discussions that took place afterwards.
My longest discussion was my with host aunt, Olga. As a native of Medellín, Olga was deeply concerned with her own image. When this project goes back to the United States and eventually the entire internet, what image is it portraying of Colombia. I tried to defend our work in saying that when I go back to the states, I'm definitely going to mention the amazing experiences I have had inside as well as outside of the field, but the truth is, I believed what she was saying. These stories might now be intertwined with my DukeEngage experience, but for a simple viewer of any of our videos, without my commentary, what more is Colombia than a country whose persevering inhabitants live in slums.
These stories are in fact necessary in depicting a side of the world that many people, Colombians included, do not have a proper perception of. However, within the narrow range of material that transcends the boundary of US-Colombia social relations, will these videos of poverty and perseverance finally show Colombia in a brighter light than its drug-ridden image of the past? Or should we in turn focus another project or set of videos on the further development of Colombia's image.
Among countless discussions with my group about this question, I've tried to rationalize our program. Our objectives are clear in that we'd like give the chance to share your own story to some of the displaced and impoverished people of Colombia who don't have the ability to do so by themselves. While we try not create a hierarchy of misfortune in opting for one story over another, many people who question this should realize that you might already have the power or mobility to share your own story. Furthermore, in addition, with sharing pathways like Facebook and personal contact, in many ways our personal stories, pictures, comments, and memories of Medellín still have more mobility than our videos, which are only present on Youtube and our website.
