Getting ready to travel again. I've got some visits to make with my friends in Siglo XX and some visits in the Yungas, and I still need to head down south to check out what kinds of possibilities there are down there. Not sure whether I will be able to head out by the end of this week, but if not, then first thing next week.

Meantime, it's winter in La Paz, which means chilly at night and bright sunshine all day.

Welcome Back to Bolivia

On the cab ride from the airport, four taxis (including mine) arrived at an intersection at exactly the same time. All four sped into the intersection until each had to stop, inches from the drivers side door of the taxi that had entered from its right. None could move forward. In Bolivia, you only need four cars to make a traffic jam. And if only one car had had the patience to wait until another car passed, everyone would have gotten by faster.

For anyone who wants to understand Bolivia, the lesson is there, five minutes from the airport gate.

Trailer!!!

The Trailer is up. Thanks to Taylor for the footage of Nevada and the help editing.

It sure is some pretty pictures.

www.fileden.com/files/2007/4/12/977104/a%20miners%20luck13mb.mov

You may need the latest version of QuickTime Player to see it, which you can download free from apple:

here for windows:

www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime716forwindows.html

or here for apple:

www.apple.com/quicktime/download/

DC rat race

I'm in DC doing the ugly, ugly business of making documentaries. Which is to say, asking friends and family to make donations to the project and trying to get some larger institution involved, as a philanthropic venture. It's ugly, and it makes me really just want to climb back into a dark hole in the ground and look at miners.

But we got a trailer that is pretty good and shows some nice pictures of kids digging in the dirt and pretending to be miners for a day, and drilling with a four pound single jack hammer, and talking about how nobody does that any more. Which is a good thing to show next to some of the footage I already had of Bolivian miners working in the mines.

In other news, I pitched the story to a film production company, which I knew wasn't going to be interested, but it was a really useful practice pitch. Good feedback about the trailer, from the kinds of people I need to be able to pitch to.

heading up to the mountains tomorrow, and looking forward to being out of this game for at least a day.

'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.