Special Olympics and Olympic-Sized Trials

Back in Kathmandu, again unexpectedly, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned so far, it’s that you’ve just gotta roll with the punches… especially if you’re operating on Nepali time. Either I find out what’s happening at the last minute, miss it altogether, or find out way in advance and everything falls through. The bad news: to my total dismay, the students just started a two week summer vacation smack in the middle of my ten-week stay. The good news: within that summer break, three days have been filled with the Nepali version of the Special Olympics, and this Saturday there will be a district-wide, day-long deaf picnic in a nearby village. (On the Fourth of July, no less! Same idea, different cause of celebration.) In the remaining vacation days, I’ll catch up on logging (ay caramba), get establishing shots around Banepa, and film at the hostel where ten students live. For the next 72 hours, however, I am unabashedly vegging out in Kathmandu. Three straight dawn-to-dusk shooting days in an chaotic, unpredictable environment 28 long, long kilometers from the familiarity and control of the deaf school has left me exhausted. On the flip side, I survived a wild ride on top of a bus (as pictured; halfway regretting not bringing the camera up there) and got some killer footage at the games (Sumit, the school’s star athlete, passed out promptly after crossing the finish line to bring home the silver medal in the 400m race… it was Kerri-Strugg-in-the ’96-Olympics epic!).

Like everyone else’s projects, this film has been an ever-morphing entity and an exciting, all-consuming rollercoaster. The “golden thread” is proving to be an elusive one… I had a brief panic attack after reading MacDougal’s “Social Aesthetics” (better late than never…!) and his methodology for selecting student subjects in order narrow the focus of his study. My plan (and, in fact, execution) had been to follow all the teachers and students, intending to pick and choose the interesting bits in the editing room—since the school has a mere forty students, I intended to create a “portrait of a place” by piecing together disparate elements (people, classrooms, conversations) in and around the school. Now, I’m not convinced this could maintain the interest of an audience for twenty minutes (even given the novelty of sign language), nor would it provide a solid structure for a film. Still, hope is not lost; though I realize MacDougal’s method is one of many ways to focus a film, I am finding certain relationships to be emerging as particularly captivating—a recent graduate spends afternoons teaching sign language to a twelfth grader who recently lost his hearing, the first graders learn as much from one another as they do from the teachers, a group of young women spend their final days crafting together before parting ways for the real world, the school’s sole deaf teacher is passionate, expressive, and the students’ unanimous favorite... With my remaining time, I plan to focus on five relationships (though I’ll probably narrow it down to the most compelling three in the end)—I’ll braid the three stories together, possibly through location and character overlaps, though I’m not entirely sure how best to go about braiding (with a golden thread, perhaps?). I am so open to advice, constructive criticism, and gaping holes (no matter how obvious you think they might be).

Besides the treasure hunt for a golden thread, I’ve run into three serious obstacles. Sorry to burden you with a mountain of questions, but I’m really at a loss. Any advice/tips/insights on even one of these hurdles (and/or feedback on the basic structure) would be super-helpful!

1.) CONVERSATION: The deaf sign over one another—interrupting one another, starting before the other finishes, and constantly breaking off into smaller sub-conversations and rejoining the main conversation. And, oh my goodness, are they fast. This leaves me with two choices: (1) I can shoot in close-ups and medium-close ups (a la my final project at the ASL table), and sacrifice crucial parts of the conversation and keys to post-production translation, or (2) I can fit all the subjects into the frame (a la Stephanie Spray’s piece), an aesthetic break from my typical filming style (the dreaded “long take”), and make it difficult to cut ins and outs. With method 1, it’s difficult to keep up with a conversation of two people, and impossible with four or more. Picking up overlapped conversation and piecing conversations together with L-cuts won’t be possible with a visual language. With method 2, is it okay to cut into close-ups—faces of people watching, etc.—or is it too obviously faked, since the majority of the scene would be shot with a static frame? How can I deal with this dilemma? I’m also finding that while the girls and women naturally form arrangements conducive to framing (sitting in semi-circles, holding still, etc.), most of the boys have ants in their pants—they constantly shift around, step in front of the person signing, and form tight circles that are hard to break into. Even when they’re sitting, a boy will always sit down smack in front of the camera like it’s not even there, or he will scoot forward or backward to block or be blocked. Should I avoid conversations with more than two people, conversations with boys, etc.? Any tips on how I might best film a visual language?

2.) TRANSLATION: I’ve been clinging to the naïve fantasy that by the end of three months, I’ll be totally fluent in NSL and can come home to effortlessly tranlate 20+ hours of conversation. However, when I asked Krishna (the head teacher) the content of what I thought was a pretty simple, straightforward conversation between two boys, she had no idea what they were talking about… and this is after fifteen years of signing daily in a deaf school. In other words, YIKES. One possible solution is going all Forests of Bliss on you and not translating at all. From the beginning, I’ve made an effort to film events accessible to a Western audience: math lessons, the sign language lessons between the two boys, the recent grads’ crafting circle, sports and games, etc. In theory, it'd be possible to build a film that doesn’t need translation. However, I think that translated conversation is crucial to really understanding this rich culture, creating story lines (which I want!), revealing personalities and relationships, and maintaining the audience’s interest. I don’t think every scene and every gesture need to be translated, but I do think a few scenes of conversation will be critical. What’s a girl to do? I’ve been in brainstorming mode… I could show potentially key conversations to the people who originally had them, and work through the nitty gritty of the conversation. This is especially feasible with Sharmila and Krishna, with whom communication has been more advanced. The main problem is that more often than I’d like to admit, I have no idea what my subjects are talking about. I’m so focused on cinematography that I often don’t know what I’m getting—even when my frame is static, there’s something about watching a conversation in two dimensions that makes it more difficult to understand. So with this growing Mt. Everest of footage, I don’t know which conversations have the most important content—just which conversations have the best lighting, framing, etc. Waiting until I return to Harvard will cut me off from my subjects (few have e-mail, and the internet in Banepa works sluggishly, if at all), but there are a handful of people in America fluent in NSL that I could potentially rope into the project. I’m taking steps in the right direction… Any time there’s a written component of a scene (blackboards, lesson books, passed notes), I’ve gotten close-ups of the Nepali, which I hope will later help decode anything I don’t understand. More and more often, I try to get a debrief from the subjects post-conversation, but this is tough when a conversation is 10-15 minutes long, or when the conversation ends naturally because people must leave. How are those of you who don’t know the language fluently dealing filmically (Lucas and Julia, are you the only two?)? Do the rest of you have any suggestions?

3.) ETHICS OF FILMING: This is perhaps the toughest yet, since there are never such clear-cut lines when it comes to moral reasoning. Nevertheless, I’ve been totally floored by the heavy issues I’ve been dealing with, and thought you anthro folk might be more experiences in the area. I’ve been asking myself a lot lately, “Which matters more, getting this shot or the feelings of the person this will affect?” It all seems like such a precarious balance—building a strong, three-dimensional film requires that you get shots that might not always be emotionally easy and forces you to get closer when you’d rather pull away, but at the same time, building trusting relationships is an important part of the process too, and I often don’t know when it’s better to turn off the camera and forfeit a scene. Shooting at the Special Olympics was really tough for me—I was constantly on edge about shooting handicapped strangers, especially without their explicit permission. The footage was mostly just unincriminating establishing shots—people chatting, spectating, and participating—but I was very worried about how I would be percieved. Are there any guidelines to filming the physically/mentally handicapped? Also, the night before last, the grandmother of my host family had what seemed to be a stroke (after a night of high blood pressure and total paralysis, she’s lost the use of her right face and arm, can’t hear, and can’t speak), and I’m currently facing the very real, sobering possibility that she might be dead when I return to Banepa. If she survives, she will undoubtedly be in a precarious state, and the vibe in the house is bound to be different. I feel so selfish to even have this on my mind, but I am wondering how this will affect filming. I’ve been shooting Krishna and her family in the house as part of the project, and there are several shots I haven’t gotten yet that are important to the opening sequence as planned. I would feel really uncomfortable incorporating the grandmother’s illness or death into the film, but I also don’t know: is it okay to shoot at all? How are y’all grappling with the ethics of filming? How far can you push til you’ve pushed too far?

I can’t wait for your feedback and continued posts… In the meantime, thinking warmly of y’all and sending all the good karma I’ve gained circumambulating stupas!