Written by Kim Kokernot
Amid the pitch black of the moonless night, a projector hummed. A stream of light cut through the darkness, carrying the images of the Yao people to a sheet-made screen in Nomba, Mozambique.
Sounds of Chiyao, the native language, filled the pitched roof of a pavilion as the people of Nomba watched the first images captured by the Yao and for the Yao.
Never before had the people of the village seen a movie in their own language. As the laughter of children and adults mingled while the film rolled, four Americans smiled.
After three weeks of teaching through a translator to educate four Nomba locals on the art of film this summer, seniors Nick Michael and Tyler Jones, along with junior Kelsey Sherrod and Samford University junior Maribeth Browning watched as their students, Tayo, Victor, Lucia and Lucia each premiered their first documentaries. They filmed about how to knit and build a rocket stove, and they even produced comedies with a moral twist.
“The laughter and the amusement was really encouraging because you could just see that this story makes sense to them,” Sherrod said. “It was funny, and they respected it. You could also tell that the guys and the women who put their films together were proud of what they had done.”
For the film premiere, the Yao filmmakers dressed up, got haircuts and invited their friends and families to attend. Michael said this personal pride for their work and seeing people come to watch the films that had been produced locally gave both teams a sense of accomplishment.
“Seeing all that pride, we really felt like we had contributed something,” Michael said. “It wasn’t putting ourselves on display. It was them empowered, and telling their own stories and sharing their own images.”
By bringing technology and education to Yao men and women, Michael feels that locals from the village are now able to tell their stories and help rewrite the stereotypical views of Africa.
“We’ve seen the images of Africa: images of poverty, swollen bellies, blood, dust and civil war,” Michael said. “And those kind of represent Africa, but we want to say that there’s something more to that and Africa’s not just a place, it’s a face. These cameras […] allow remote people with little access to life outside of their city to have a small soapbox on the global stage.”
But the Yao were not the only students gaining knowledge while the group was in Mozambique.
“One thing that we learned about development is that the only thing that is sustainable is memory,” Jones said. “In terms of years later, after these cameras have broken, they will remember that moment and the first time they got to watch film in their language.”
To help Tayo, Victor, Lucia and Lucia continue to film and document their culture, each student was given his or her own personal camera as a “graduation present” from film school. The team also left a high-definition camera, microphone and tripod in the village’s resource center, which can be checked out by the students.
Around three weeks ago, the team was informed that the camera equipment had been checked out and was used to document the ending of local sacred initiation rights where girls in the village transition from being girls to women.
“That’s maybe been the biggest milestone of the whole project, because it’s saying to us that here are individuals who are actually choosing to use these resources to document their culture,” Jones said. “They’re saying ‘I want to preserve that.'”
Jones hopes that the images filmed will be shown during movie nights once a month, a concept they talked about while still overseas. Sherrod sees this as an opportunity to uplift the self-esteem of people who have had their spirits broken by past oppression.
“It’s an identity boost,” Sherrod said. “It’s like saying ‘This is who we are, and our stories are worth sharing.'”
The footage shot by the local filmmakers will also eventually make its way to the U.S. through the Internet, where it can be edited and used by the team.
But going to Mozambique was a bigger project than simply teaching locals how to film and preserve their culture using technology. The group spent a full month traveling around the country filming its own documentary based on the question of “What is development?” before it began filming the process of teaching the Yao to film themselves.
Michael found that development is “highly contextual” and depends on specific people and places, and that those who try to reach out may fail because of a lack of relationship.
“It’s tied to you feeling like you have to do something but just not knowing how,” Michael said. “In most cases, it can’t be short term. It can’t be ideological. It has to be practical, and it has to be tangible. And it has to happen in context on the ground.”
He said he feels that he only understands development in the Nomba context because of the time that they spent there, working alongside the local people.
Jones said he feels that the film class became somewhat of a case study in working with people directly to influence development.
“If anything’s going to be sustainable, if anything’s going to be culturally appropriate, the people that you’re trying to work with have to be at the table with you,” Jones said. “So, that was the consensus that we got that justified us doing our own development project and trying to test that.”
Once their documentary is edited and ready for viewing, they hope audiences will walk away with a deconstructed view of development in Africa.
“We want to help them break into […] people groups and to faces and individuals and say this is development that worked in this specific circumstance for Tayo, for Lucia,” Michael said. “And these specific efforts helped them individually, whereas it’s easy to say, ‘lets try to solve the big problem and lets try and solve it in two hours.’ […] We want you to leave the documentary asking questions that only a local on the ground in Africa could answer, and no one else.”
Jones and Michael are currently in the process of editing footage of their travels through Mozambique and their time spent teaching the Yao to film, and they plan to send their documentary through the film festival circuit.
