'Neath the Sagebrush and the Cactus

I am in Hawthorne, Nevada. Hawthorne is out in the middle of the desert, and the main business for Hawthorne is the reservation where they store ammunition. From where I am sitting, I count at least nine flags, not to mention the bunting and streamers and other red white and blue themed items.

Hawthorne is also about twenty miles from Hugh's mine, where we did another shoot this morning. It was another really good shoot, along with the stuff we did yesterday at his home and the shoot we did in Tonopah on Saturday.

It's real wild west country and wild west people. I had to chuckle when Hugh said of a valley where he had worked a talc mine had "some real colorful characters." As if Hugh weren't colorful.

It's beautiful stuff to take pictures of though, and I think we have about what we need to cut together a trailer. So look for an update from Boston, next week.

No Sleep till Brooklyn

So I am back in DC already. I got back much earlier than I thought I would, in order to be back for my grandmother's funeral. I miss her dearly. She was always so curious and a little bit dumbfounded by what I am doing in Latin America. But she always understood that it was something I love to do and supported me for that reason if for no other reason.

This is already promising to be a really busy trip, with work to do for "A Miner's Luck" and for a handful of other projects that I am involved in. One is regarding a World Bank Rural Development Project in Bolivia that was terminated and never received any follow-up or support for the maintenance and operation of the project. The other is to help Guillermo Ruiz publish the works of his father in the US in order to generate a little bit of revenue for his retirement.


Both of these are really interesting projects, and I am working with really good people on them, but they sure do take a lot of time. At any rate, I think I have most of the pieces of the puzzle ready for Nevada. The only thing that I am a little bit sad about is that I didn't get the short piece about the miners in Bolivia done to the point where I should have gotten it. It's almost ready, and it will have to do for Jim Butler Day, but there are just a handful of things that should be better.

Fortunately we will get a chance to work a little more on that in Boston before I show it to anyone else in DC. But it does mean another thing to do.

I Get by with a Little Help

It's been, to say the least, a busy couple of weeks, and things have been progressing well.

I have finished a pretty good version of the treatment (click the link in the last post). You will note the beautiful cover, which my friend Gisel put together. She took a photo that Taylor shot and decided that it looked best as a dime store western cover.
And that is just what I'm after, with a few roles reversed here and there. A number of people read it, including Jeff, his dad, Heather and Carolina. Little by little, it gets better and better.

I also went to Siglo XX with Sixto Choque, who helped me get some production photos for the film. I shot a little bit of video, and sixto shot a bunch of photos, which I think will be really good for future graphic design needs and for video stills. I've been working with a cuadrillo of miners who keep inviting me back to their workplace again and again. It's their friendship and welcome most of all that makes this kind of work possible.

We also went to Macha, where the communities from the region celebrate the fiesta de la cruz by banding together and beating the snot out of each other. It's kind of a weird spectacle -- it happens at this time of year in Macha and in a number of other communities, and it happens throughout the north of Potosi throughout the year.

What struck me most from this spectacle is the lack of understanding between people who live in the campo and people who live in the city. The people who are from the town of Macha, where the festival happens every year, just lack any in depth understanding of the festival or the communities around Macha. Yes, they speak Quechua, but they can't identify the community relationships or even explain what the fiesta means to the people who participate. Not that I can either, but I'm not trying to be part of this multicultural, multiethnic society of Bolivia.

At any rate, I hope to post some of Sixto's photos in a subsequent post.

And we've been editing. Carolina has been helping me to cut together a short trailer for the film and a ten minute short of miners in Siglo. She has a very good eye, a remarkable capacity to deal with schedule changes and she instantly understood the project and what I am aiming for. I think that we'll get a really good trailer, once I finish getting the footage I'll need from Taylor in Nevada in a couple of weeks.

Also, Daniela just helped me move all of my stuff into her house.

Project Treatment

Check out the treatment of the project:


A Miner's Luck

I'm Not Crazy. No really, I'm Not.

Just got back from a short trip to the Yungas of La Paz. These are the steep tropical foothills of the Andes, a description that hardly does them justice. It is a landscape that doesn't exist in any other context of the imagination. You can't really photograph it because there isn't a center of focus. Are you looking at the mountains -- long finger ridges that go on forever in all directions -- or are you looking at the valleys -- the negative space between the mountains. Or the clouds, which move across the sky in every different angle all at the same time. It's not a landscape I can explain or even understand.

This trip include a visit to Santa Rosa de Lima and a community called Chillata. Chillata is about a two hour walk from the main road. No cars, no nothing. It's a pretty heavily traveled road though, because there are a number of gold mines up above the town. I saw at least eight people and two mules.

The community itself operates a mine too, which seems to be their principal cash income. At the bottom of the valley, the hillsides are covered in all coca fields. Though they said they had them here too, I didn't see any at all. The terrain is so steep and hilly that they may easily have been hidden out of eyesight from the road, but certainly it is nothing like the volume in other parts of the Yungas.

It was nice to be out of the city, and nice to be walking around in the country. And it's a challenge to find individuals and communities that are really interested in presenting their community and their reality in a documentary. How do you explain to someone who has never seen a documentary that this documentary will present a comparison between mining in the US and mining in Bolivia? How do you explain that I'm not doing this to make money, that I may break even if I get lucky, but that really what I am interested in is telling a story? Their story really.

What I am doing lies so far outside of their vision of the world and of what is possible, that it's hard to convince people that I this is really what I am doing. Come to think of it, I imagine that a number of you feel the same way.

What's interesting (and reassuring, sort of) is that in the mining towns, like Siglo XX, I found a number of people who said they wouldn't mind if I filmed them, they just wanted me to make a documentary that showed their reality. It's reassuring because it took me at least three visits to find these people and get to know them. So I think that with a little time and a lot of walking, I'll be able to find the same thing here in the Yungas.

More Problems, please

Thanks to Aziz Isham, I solved the problem of the translator. The problem with a translator is that the American miner, Hugh, doesn't speak Spanish. Bringing him to Bolivia he will be able to see things and react to that, but he won't be able to react directly to what the people say. Plus everything in Spanish will have to be subtitled, and who reads subtitles. Bah. So we need an interpretor who will filter all of this information from Spanish to English and back again. Which sounds like a really boring way to make a film.

Aziz astutely raised yet another issue, the last time I talked to him. He noted that the film would benefit from having two miners who could interact rather than one. Call it the sidekick problem. Our miner needs someone to play off of and to talk to. Someone to ask him engaging questions and listen to what he says. Someone interesting, knowledgeable about mining and engaging on film. What Aziz didn't realize is that by raising the sidekick problem he was really solving the translator problem. The translator and the sidekick are one and the same.

I just finished a great interview with the second miner, Pedro. He started working in the mines in Cerro Rico in Potosi when he was very young, after his father had a bad accident and needed the help. From there, he began working as an assistant to one of the tour operators who bring gringos into the cooperatives of Cerro Rico. He taught himself English with the tourists and tripled his pay. He now works occasionally in the mines and occasionally as a guide.

Here's what struck me about Pedro when I met him two years ago. He stopped and asked his group of tourists in the mine and asked them why they wanted to see the mines in Potosi. It wasn't aggressive at all, but it showed a curiosity and thoughtfulness that is uncommon among bolivian tour guides. Enough so that, two years later, I remembered his name and was able to track him down almost instantly.

And in an interview this afternoon (with a beautiful golden sunlight and a perfect backdrop of green grasses), he proved to be curious, engaging, easygoing, entertaining. In short, it seems that my first impression was pretty accurate. Here is a translator who is interesting, knowledgeable about mining and engaging on film. Here is someone who can play off of Hugh, ask him engaging questions and listen to what he says. And a translator to boot.

So thanks to Aziz for raising solutions disguised as problems.

I have an intern, which is new and exciting. She's into the editing aspect of film and has been reviewing the footage I have already shot with an eye to how to cut together a thrilling trailer. She's smart and has a good eye. And she didn't bat an eyelash when I told her that we were going to cut a trailer now with the footage that I have so far and some footage of Nevada that hasn't been shot yet. And she has actual credentials in filmmaking. She graduated from Yale with a degree in film.

Other than that, a pretty uneventful week -- a little fundraising, which has been going pretty well, a little institutional capacity building and some planning for my trip back North to film the Nevada State Mining Championships.

Rather than bore you some more, I'm going to post a few pics.


The answer to the obvious question you are about to ask about the first picture is in the little blue bottle. CEIBO alchohol. The drink of choice for cooperativistas at carnaval... or any other time for that matter.

This is what Carnaval is basically about to me. The little bit of a rainbow over the rough edges of a hard life.


Lode Star Gold. Of course in Bolivia, this truck would be valued because it could get you home rather than because it's an antique. Doesn't have anything to do with the documentary, but it's a beautiful truck.