Amateur actors and old cars - challenges in the bush

For Alice and Peter's Weblog, see http://alicepeter.blogspot.com

After weeks of preparations, we have now recorded the first scenes for our film on maternal health. We shot the first sequences in the village of Bantomi on Tuesday last week.

It feels really good to have begun the work that we have been thinking about and planning for so long. As mentioned in our previous entry on this site, the cast is made up by local village people and staff members from the health clinic in Barmoi. It's great fun to work with these people, but also a huge challenge, since many of them have never acted, let alone been in a film before.

The cast has been divided into two groups according to the story. Last week we shot most of the scenes where we followed the story of the fortunate woman, who does go to the clinic, gets assistance from a trained birth attendance and finally has a safe delivery at the local health clinic.

Due to the light conditions here, we can only really film in the early morning hours and late in the afternoon. At midday the sun is simply too bright and it is almost impossible to create nice pictures with balanced contrast and colours. We try not to push the cast too hard, but the work is surprisingly tiring especially when we have to take the same scene over and over again.

This week we have planned only to film in the late afternoon. In the morning hours people are busy cooking, washing clothes and getting ready for the day's duties, so it is not convenient for them to spend a couple of hours in front of our camera. In order not to tire them out, we will only work with them towards the end of the day, where the warm sunlight makes the fields and villages look truly stunning. We will spend the rest of the day in Kambia going through the recorded material of the previous day and working on the the other projects that we deal with.

We did quite a few entertaining shots during the first couple of days, but a really good one was a scene in which one of the women has to take local transport to get to the clinic to deliver her baby. After negotiating the payment of a fair amount of Leones, the Sierra Leonean currency, we managed to get a driver from Barmoi to let us use his vehicle for half an hour. The car was literally falling apart; the wind screen was shattered, there was a big hole in the rusty metal plate under the clutch and the door in the driver's side was only kept in place by an old screwdriver stuck through the roof to put pressure on the door!

The driver and his assistant both featured in the film and they we both really good. When the car finally had to start moving and take the pregnant woman to the clinic, not surprisingly it would not start. Some of the passengers, there were at least ten of them sitting in the the back, had to get out and push the rusty and noisy machine backwards for some fifteen metres, before the engine finally spluttered into life! Off they went with our fictional nine months pregnant woman squeezed in beside the driver and a pretty nervous husband sitting at the back.

If the audience will have half off the fun watching this that we had capturing it, we think we have at least one brilliant scene in our film.

We spent two nights at the clinic in Barmoi and on one of these we went to the local cinema to watch a Nigerian film. The cinema was actually a TV and video run by a generator in a school classroom and costs around 10p entry fee. Despite the uncomfortable wooden benches and poor quality of the film, the room was packed. This makes us realise the popularity of film in these remote areas and also gives us a potential location for showing our film.

Here in Kambia you'd be forgiven for forgetting that Christmas is just around the corner. In Freetown a couple of weeks ago we spotted a blow-up Father Christmas outside one of the Lebanese shops, but here there isn't a decoration in sight. We have been promised a big party on Christmas day with music, cultural shows and food. We'll keep you posted.

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For Alice and Peter's Weblog, see http://alicepeter.blogspot.com