Filming Adventures

Well, the chicken film is old news by now. Hannah, Tania, and I have been working on our 15-minute film a lot recently, and we'll continue to work on it until the end of the semester. As I mentioned some time ago, the film is about waste management in Accra. We're still not completely sure how it's going to turn out, but so far we've gotten some pretty good footage, although our filming was not without its complications...

Wednesday morning, Hannah and I met at the academic center at 7:00 AM to pick up the film equipment for our shoot. Our plan for the day was to go around the city and get shots of various neighborhoods and filth, shots that would mostly be filler shots or shots that would verify the fact that, indeed, Accra isn't the cleanest city around. We also needed to deliver two letters, one to the Waste Management Department of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly and the other to the Environmental Health and Sanitation Unit. We had gone to the Waste Management Department of the AMA the week before to ask for an interview. It took us forever to find the place, traffic was bad, and then we sat around some secretaries office for almost two hours just to hear the director of the WMD talk for five minutes about how we needed a letter before they could discuss being in our film. We told him we had a letter, and we showed it to him. The letter explained the film and had the signiture of the director of NYU in Ghana on it, as well as her business card, but he told us we needed a letter head. Oh, the technicalities... although I guess I can understand. If three people want to make a film about waste management in Accra, it's probably not going to be super positive, and it's definitely not going to praise the AMA for their waste management efforts. Although when stating the purpose of our film, we wrote that Our intentions were to not point any fingers and just be as objective as possible about the situation.

So Hannah and I picked up the film equipment that Alpha left for us in the conference room and headed out to the road to catch a cab to Independence Square. The first location for our shoot was the beach behind Independence Square because it's probably the dirtiest beach in Accra. We wanted to go there early in the morning so that the lighting would be good for filming. So we got down at the square and made our way across. The beach in the morning light was amazingly gorgeous, even with all the trash around. We started to set up the camera. By now we had gotten pretty used to the camera, how to set it up for good shots, adjust the lighting and sound and whatnot. We were taking our time, though, because it was early and we wanted to get the shots just right. For our first shot we wanted to just get a nice pan of the whole beach to do a nice overview. We hadn't actually started filming yet, and as I was fiddling with the camera, I hear an angry voice say something at me, but I couldn't understand the words. I still fiddled with the camera as I looked up, and what I saw was completely unexpected. Standing in front of me was a military man probably not much older than me, dressed in camoflage and holding a gigantic gun which he pointed right at us (they all carry gigantic guns here... it's a bit unsettling). He screamed again, and this time I understood him, "Get away from the camera I said!" Then he sort of lunged at us, all of this sort of happening in one instant, at which point we backed away from the camera very confused and very compliant with the man carrying the big gun.

"What are doing here?" he asked us.

"We're students. We're making a film for one of our classes and we wanted to film here," Hannah said.

"Who gave you permission to film here?"

We both looked at each other. "Our professor told us we didn't need permission. He told us it would be alright for us to just film wherever," we told him.

Then he started talking to some guy on his walkie-talkie. After he got off, we told him, "Look, we're sorry, we didn't know we couldn't film here. We'll just leave now."

"You're not going anywhere!" he told us. "I've arrested you for trying to film the castle." Hannah and I looked up at the castle. The camera did look like it was pointed at the castle, but it was actually pointed at the beach. Soon some other guy came over and didn't say anything, just stood there holding his gun. This guy was a bit older, maybe in his 40s. After he came over, the first guy completely changed his demeanor and started smiling and asking us, "Which country do you come from?"

"America," we told him.

"Ahhh, America. I really want to go there. You know, here in Ghana, I just don't have the opportunities to do what I want. How can I get over there?" he asked.

"Uhmm..." Sometimes people just have unrealistic expectations of white people. I may be from America, but that doesn't mean I know how to get you over there. "I guess the only way I know you can go is if you marry an American," I said.

He continued to make this small talk for a while, but every now and then he would just become very aggressive and angry, and he asked us again who gave us permission to film there. We gave him the same answer as before, and he told us to call our professor and get him to come down there right now. I didn't question it, and to be honest, I really wanted Alpha to be there to help us out a bit, because we really didn't know what was going on. So I called Alpha, and told him we had encountered some problems filming at the beach and that he needed to come to where we were to help us out. Alpha asked me to ask the name of the guys who were talking to us, which I didn't think was very relevant, but I did, and the guy just shouted back at us, "That's not necessary! Tell him to come here now!" So I told Alpha what he had said, and Alpha was on his way.

Then the guy came back to small talk, but it was very uncomfortable small talk. He would make comments suggesting that I should let him marry my sister (Hannah he meant) so he could get into America. Then he would come back to being angry, and every time we tried to explain what we were doing there, he wouldn't let us say anything. Hannah started to become really uncomfortable, and the guy asked her, "What's the matter? You don't like me." The whole time I couldn't help but notice that his gun was pointed at my foot, though he wasn't aiming it, it was just hanging off of him that way. I'm pretty sure this guy was just so satisfied with the fact that we were confused and afraid because he had a gun and therefore had liberty to say what he pleased. Soon more and more military men started coming to where we were. One of them who was clearly the leader of the group came up to us and started talking to us. When he came, the other guy left which was a big relief. This new guy was much more sensible and didn't find it necessary to treat us like scum. He asked what we were doing there, and we gave him the whole spiel about being students, making a film, filming trash and the beach and not the castle... He told us to put our equipment away and come with him to the castle to interact with his boss so that he can make a judgement about what we were doing. He told us not to be frightened, that it was only "a matter of national security", so they "can't take anything for granted" as he told me, and we would be fine.

As we started walking towards the castle, Alpha showed up (hallelujah!). He was very spry and talked to the guys a lot, explaining us and explaining that we had every right to film there, and of course they weren't filming the castle, they just wanted to film trash, and oh, they came to this beach because they knew there would be guards around the protect them if someone started messing with them while they were trying to film. I must say, I was pretty impressed by Alpha's fast tongue, but really it wasn't necessary. We went to the castle regardless and saw the boss for about a minute. We didn't even say anything really. The guy just explained our situation and his boss didn't seem to really care at all. He told us it was fine if we filmed the beach. Whew! That was a relief!

So Hannah, Alpha, and I walked back to the beach, trying to laugh the whole thing off, but still a little shaken up. By now the sun was starting to get really bright which was what we were trying to avoid by coming out early. Nevertheless, we got some pretty good shots at the beach of trash, some big overview shots and some close-ups. Then we got out of there because we had already spent way too much time there and now our plan looked like it might now work out as well as we had hoped. We took a cab to Kaneshie, where the WMD has its headquarters. On the way there, we got the cab driver to stop at a few different places so we could get shots. I got a shot of a wall that had painted on it, "Keep Our City Clean," a few gutters filled with trash, and most importantly, the sewage river that runs through the industrial area. There was trash everywhere in the sewage river, especially under the bridge that the cars go over. I got some really good shots of some birds playing in the trash.

When we got to the WMD, Hannah ran in to drop off our letter. I walked around the corner to see if I could find any food, particularly some red red. Red red is bean stew with fried plantains, and it's probably one of the greatest things that man has ever created. I'm pretty sure the stew just consists of palm oil, tomatoes, onions, pepper, and maybe some garlic or other spices. It's pretty amazing. Alas, I had no luck in finding red red, but I did find a little boy who happened to be sweeping up trash. As soon as Hannah came back from delivering the letter, I pointed towards the boy and we went over to ask him if we could film him sweeping up the trash. He sought approval from his mother, who just smiled and waved at us, and so we set up the camera quickly to get a shot of the boy sweeping. Well, it turned out well in one sense because we got him sweeping, but it was also kind of bad because about 10 others kids all grabbed brooms and started sweeping in front of the camera as well. They didn't look at the camera at all, which impressed me, but just the fact that 10 kids were in this small space sweeping made it look very staged, which it was (it's the fundamental contradiction of documentary-making - you want to show "reality," something objective, some unstaged, but ultimately you still have to stage everything to a degree).

We decided to walk towards Kaneshie Market to film there because we figured it would be pretty dirty. On the way Hannah got some pineapple and I finally found my red red. of course, the woman didn't understand that I didn't want to get it to go, so she put the piping hot beans and plantains in a plastic bag. I didn't know what to do, so Hannah and I just walked until we found a place where we could sit down and rest. The heat was getting to us, and we wanted to eat in some comfort. From now until I die I'll always associate profuse amounts of sweat with filming... there's just no escape from the heat. It took me about 10 minutes to find someone who would let us borrow a bowl and a spoon. But I did find those items essential to eating hot beans (which are actually black-eyed peas, mind you, they just call them beans here), and I enjoyed the red red very much. We proceeded to the market, which was discovered was way too crowded to film in. It was just cause too much of a commotion. Plus, there was really no place where lots of trash was concentrated in one area, it just spread out all about. Then I started thinking about how it was kind of silly to try to proove Accra is a dirty city by showing a market because even in a clean city, the market is likely to be a little dirty. So we left, a bit dejected but still fairly satisfied that we had gotten a few shots.

We went to the Environmental Health and Sanitation Unit, which is actually now the AMA Public Health Department. We met a man named Wisdom whom we gave the letter to. Wisdom is the information man at the Public Health Department. He was very kind to us and told us he would be happy to do an interview for our film. He even said we could do the interview then, but we both had classes to go to, so we made an appointment to do the interview on Monday morning. This made Hannah and me very happy. The ease with which we secured that interview (we were uncertain how easy it would be because of the way the director of the WMD had sort of shrugged us off) made Hannah and I forget all about the unfortunate incidence that morning. Then I went home and had a nice shower before class, washing away the sweat from my labor (and by my labor, I mean the equatorial sun).