this night i went with my belgian partner in crime to see a screening of gattaca in french... there is an old [sundried clay] brick wall around a concrete yard [the stars serve as ceiling] filled with benches ; the cheap ones are low concrete walls with half a meter space to put your feet, the expensive ones [$0.35 per screening] are real wooden benches. at the back there's a small brick building with four small windows, the projectorroom. up front there's a massive wall, that has been plastered white. ciné wemtenga. the sound is produced by two harmed metal megaphones. the poster reads "dolby surround where available". it is very special to watch the images of a film and develop a story with the knowledge of about a fourth of the words. still, no problems at all "to be pulled into someone else's suspension of time". warm blood rushes through my cheeks when the crowd cheers. whenever the heroe achieves something or the bad guy is being overthrown, the theatre is filled with enthusiastic applause and laughter. yes, i love it much. the power of a story
13IV1999
above my ancient computer there are two things that inspire in a way that only they might be able to explain:
I the blueprints for "FAUSTUS II" a monsterous means of transport that explores the universe navigated by colonel DERIDA and his crew [Maarten Hagel, HEXACOMPLEXAPISVIS, zizl, ping pong and a lazy vulture whose name i have fortgotten]
---II THIS IS JUST TO SAY
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox
and which you where probably saving for breakfast
Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
William Carlos Williams
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work has really started now. i am busy translating the scripts that gideon and i have been writing for 13 educational programs on traffic safety. my french is slowly growing stronger [although i have found out that stottering and murmering will create a bigger sympathy and generosity among your audience than fluent french of which they don't recognize half the vocabulary]. it remains a strange idea that two boys [or a boy and a young man] with such a small knowledge of the language [and with a great dictionary] are able to write and shoot programs that will hopefully be broadcasted on the national stations of most of the frenchspeaking african countries. thrilling...i really want to get the most out of it; trying to produce high quality with the resources that we have. tomorrow we'll be following a peasant women for a day, shooting one day of her every day life. i wonder if we can really record what is there. the people here dislike cameras very much and don't trust the whites operating them for a bit. i don't blame them...i've read the history of this country, but we are here to help and sometimes that's difficult to explain. it would be much better to educate locals and sometimes that happens, but there's a lot of bad burkinabe cameramen. i suspect that is because they are not raised with the media, at least not as much as we do and because there's a lot of bad examples at the national channel. but there's light...luc is a bright burkinabe who studies communication [a mixture of journalism, film & television; without money to really practise shooting projects] he writes occasionally for one of the biggest newspapers of burkina and is a reporter for the national radiostation, he is politically engaged [at this moment there is a lot of disturbance about the death of norbert ZONGO, who was the editor of the only independant newspaper in this state. norbert ZONGO was killed in a strange way after having published several articles that accuse the president of political murders. there have been national strikes lately, also because the presidents brother killed his driver and seems to be able to get away with it. many students and intellectuals declare that burkina has no real democraty, but is in fact reigned by a dictator] so he's worried by that and somewhere deep inside a rebel with a cause, but he realises that there's no way that he'll survive writing against the gouvernement, so he writes about the arts and development programs. luc is going to help gideon and me with interviews and he will do some research as well to releave the work of his cousin damiba a little.