Repeating Islands

Director Jonathan Demme had planned to shoot a “music driven” documentary in Haiti with the talented Canadian group Arcade Fire right before the quake struck, Boston Phoenix (via The Playlist) reports. Régine Chassagne, wife of lead singer Win Butler and founding member of the band is from Haiti. Demme had this to say in an interview:

“I was heading for Haiti last Friday [the Friday after the earthquake] with the band Arcade Fire. We were going to do a music driven, kind of music documentary, against a backdrop of carnival in Jacmel — the great, now devastated, south coast Haitian city. We had our final conference call the morning of the day the quake struck. We were gonna go down anyway until we realized we can’t really get there. My personal feeling was, those who go down two months or three months from now, with a specific mission in mind, will be valuable in their own way, as the people that are going now. So I’m gonna go. I’m gonna go within the next six months, but I haven’t been yet.”

. . .

PK: One of the films you are showing is “The Agronomist.” I know that you have a deep love for Haiti. Can you talk a little about it given the recent disaster?

JD: Well, I was on the phone earlier today with a young man, a sergeant, in the US Army. His name is Gonzales Joseph. He was calling me because he’s got a camera down there in Haiti. He’s part of the force that responded to the disaster in Haiti. He’s got his camera with him. He’s getting, what he described as, extraordinary and important footage. We were talking about ways to get that up here and what we could do with it once it arrives. Gonzales is, if you can remember the wedding scenes in “Rachel Getting Married” (2008) and there is a guy in uniform who is taking shots all the time with a video camera, cousin Joe. That is Gonzales Joseph. He’s in Haiti as a member of the US Armed Forces. But, he’s got his camera. A camera that he left “Rachel Getting Married” with. That was kind of a gift we all gave him.

But I have to take it back two more steps. He is there because Gonzales and I became pen pals when he was stationed in Iraq, five years ago. He had read about “The Agronomist.” Somehow or other, he managed to see that film in Iraq and he loved it, it spoke to him, and he wanted to get more information from the distributor. They knew I would be interested in this inquiry and we became avid email pals. So that brings “The Agronomist” right up to the minute.

That movie was chosen [as part of the retrospective] prior the catastrophic event. Just because I love documentaries so much. I love that film so much. It was something I very much was hoping to speak with people about in the context of the screening. Since the catastrophe, we have gotten a lot of calls from all kinds of sources: ‘Can we show “The Agronomist” as a fundraiser? Can we just show The Agronomist?’ It’s interesting because it’s really a home movie. It became an elaborate home movie, but it was a home movie I made about these friends of mine. It’s very much alive today and that’s part of the beauty of documentaries.

I’m going off on a slight tangent, but it was really amazing talking to Gonzales earlier, to this young guy, who wrote to me, and now he’s filming.

. . .

PK: So these images, the film that he’s shooting, is this different from what we are seeing in the news?

JD: I get the sense it is. I think that Gonzales showing up with his camera, people are talking to him, wherever he goes. I’m confident that he’s getting a different quality of discourse than what happens with the important, man in the street stuff, we have been seeing on the networks.

PK: Yeah because I was very suspicious when they started talking about how there was starting to be civil disorder, rioting and looting and so forth. They said the same thing about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and that turned out to be really exaggerated. Do you think that is the case down there too?

JD: The media loves that phase! God bless ‘em. Because now you’ve got not only disaster, you’ve got violence on top of disaster. That really sells.

PK: Speaking of which, you are making a film about Katrina?

JD: This is my longest in-production film. I have been filming four times a year in New Orleans since 3 months after the floods. I visit people who were amongst those that were the first to return to their properties and to their homes, despite being forbidden to do so, in order to save them and not let these neighborhoods be plowed under and turned into condo courts. I was lucky enough to connect. Cyril Neville, from the Neville brothers, gave the names and phone numbers of about 6 people and I was able to connect with them. Over the course of time, you know, of course, when you visit someone 4 times a year you either stop visiting or you become dear, deep friends. That’s happened. What’s emerged is, yes, there is an ongoing portrait of life in post-Katrina New Orleans as seen through the lens of about five particular families, but they have all turned into extraordinary portraits of quote unquote ordinary Americans who really rose to the occasion under extraordinary circumstances. They have become kind of biopics and the people are amazing. I’m in the cutting room now on one of them that I’m calling, “My Favorite American: the Carolyn Parker Story.”This particularly amazing, stalwart woman who I think is going to become a super star when we get this film out.

Read more at http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/outsidetheframe/archive/2010/02/24/interview-with-coolidge-award-winner-jonathan-demme.aspx#ixzz0gbidpK1v