[Written May 4, 2008]
My first day in Haiti, sitting on top of the bus that will take me to Fondwa.
It’s hard to believe that the day is finally here for the launch of our film The Road to Fondwa (RTF). I never truly understood the term “labor of love” until I took on this project with two of my good friends, Brian McElroy and Dan Schnorr. If the three of us had any idea what we were getting ourselves into with this project I don’t believe we would have ever started. It has been a long journey filled with every emotion you can imagine. There were times when we felt completely hopeless, times when we were a bit too confident, and moments when we felt that our team might unravel completely if we could not reach a compromise of some sort. But somehow we have arrived at this final version that is ready to be seen by the world through the sheer willpower and blind determination of our team. I am honored to have played an active role in this film and thankful for all of the people who helped along the way. We are now at a point that we have been dreaming about for over two years…
It all started from a crazy idea hatched in late 2005 on a cold winter’s night in Indiana. Brian was in town for a couple of days on break from his job at The University of Fondwa, Haiti (UNIF) and he roped me into helping him out with a short photo slideshow about The University of Fondwa (UNIF). Brian is an idea guy who loves to dream big dreams and then create demanding deadlines for their completion, so you won’t be surprised to learn that we stayed up all night finishing the slideshow. In fact he almost missed his flight the next morning as we scraped the night’s snowfall off my car and waited for the final DVD to burn for a screening he had set up for later that same day in New York. On the way to the airport we threw around the idea of taking it up a notch and actually filming a feature-length documentary in the region of Fondwa, Haiti. I told him if he could raise some funding I would be stoked to go and help make it happen, but I secretly believed (hoped?) that it would never be more than a passing idea. Now I know that this is never the case with Brian!
Dan and I on top of a bus driving through the Central Plateau, hitting every hole in the road.
A few months later I was on a flight to Haiti with five weeks of filming ahead of me. All I could think was “Justin, what have you gotten yourself into this time?” All I really knew about Haiti I had learned from the U.S. State Department, which advised against travel there because I was likely to be kidnapped, and the United Nations which describes Haiti as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. I also knew that I would be working closely with a guy named Dan Schnorr. Dan has since become one of my closest friends but at the time all that I knew about him was that he is incredibly adventurous with an almost complete disregard for danger. What more could you ask for in someone in charge of keeping you alive in a place like Haiti?
On the final approach to the Port-Au-Prince (PAP) airport I was amazed at the scene below. I saw: homemade rafts floating in the Caribbean hauling in the day’s pull of fish; what appeared to be a deteriorated old pirate ship marooned on a sandbar; countless ‘shacks’ strewn about amidst rivers of trash; and pockets of incredible architecture which echoed of a more prosperous time. All of this was set against a mountainous backdrop of a scale I had never imagined for this small island. Not knowing what to expect, I was fine with the pilot’s leisurely approach to the tarmac below.
As our driver flew through the hilly streets of PAP my mind was flooded with memories of an earlier trip I had taken to Ghana, West Africa. Beautiful faces everywhere, happy children playing in the alleys, tireless market women carrying the economy on their shoulders, and an obvious curiosity about the out-of-place white guy being driven around in the backseat of a pickup truck. I was excited for the weeks to come and happy to finally be on the ground in Haiti several months after that cold winter morning in Indiana when the idea had first come about.
On The Ground
Before Haiti I never realized that it was possible to ride on top of busses. It turns out that luggage racks also make fantastic seats for humans on long bus rides bumping over mountains, charging through rivers, and speeding into cities. Our first trip was a 15 hour journey through the Central Plateau of Haiti to visit the hometown of a student from UNIF. Halfway through the journey the bus stopped and we had to hitch a ride on the back of a massive truck hauling barrels full of moonshine. It was a cold and rainy night and I had several thousand dollars of camera equipment with me but we hopped on and hoped for the best. About an hour into the moonshine leg of the trip I learned that the road we were on was lined with giant cacti reaching 20 feet up from the ground. I learned this when one smashed Brian across the face and nearly threw him off the truck. He hadn’t had a sip of the moonshine so the pain wasn’t dulled in any way. He was fine after a few minutes and this incident remains one of the most hilarious things I have ever seen. As long as you watch out for renegade giant cacti I definitely recommend travel via luggage rack and moonshine truck.
Dan on top of a bus headed to Port-Au-Prince, interviewing a fellow traveler.
Soon after the cactus incident Brian had to leave the country to start an internship with Dr. Paul Farmer’s organization Partners In Health. This meant that Dan and I were alone to shoot the rest of the film over the following four weeks. Dan really stepped up to the occasion and did an incredible job of directing the project with no prior film experience at all. Since I didn’t speak a word of Haitian Creole, Dan had to run the show while I made sure we got all the shots we needed. I was impressed with Dan’s ability to relate to people on a very personal level and help them forget about the big camera in their face. Coupled with his ability to weave together a story, Dan is a natural filmmaker.
We traveled to nearly every corner of Haiti amassing about 45 hours of footage. As novice filmmakers we approached this project with the idea that the more footage we got the easier it would be to edit together when the time came. How naive we were!
Post Production
When we returned from Haiti I blocked off a couple of weeks to head to Dan’s hometown of Boston (Sudbury, MA to be exact) to begin editing the film. Brian was still working at Partners In Health in Cambridge so it seemed like the perfect situation to get the film edited and done with. To our dismay these weeks were filled with a lot of staring blankly at Final Cut Pro, the video editing software on our Apple computers. After two weeks of work we had put together a 5 minute ‘intro’ piece which we didn’t even end up using in the final version of the film. Along with some fairly severe disagreements amongst the team, this was quite a discouraging time in the project. It even got to the point where we were doubting the future of the film. Could we continue?
Almost a year passed before we made any more notable progress. I had since moved to California and was working full-time at Google, Brian was back at school in the Dominican Republic on a Rotary Scholarship, and Dan was in the middle of his first year of medical school at Columbia in New York. We managed to find time to meet regularly through video chat using the built in cameras on our laptops. Over the course of several months of meetings and false starts we realized that this thing would never be completed unless we were all in the same place for at least a couple of weeks and could focus completely on the film. Dan’s spring break was coming up and I was in the process of leaving my job, so we made the only logical choice we could – two weeks in the Dominican Republic focusing completely on editing the film! We would work tooth and nail leaving no possibility for failure. We would lock ourselves into Brian’s apartment for two weeks straight and have a finished film when we left; no exceptions!
Sitting under a mango tree in Fondwa - possibly the most peaceful few hours of my entire life.
It was great to be working with these guys again. We stuck to a rigid schedule set by Dan, the remarkably efficient med student, and had three computers going at all times editing different parts of the film all at once. At the same time that Dan would be hammering out one section of the film, I’d be smoothing out the edits on a section he had already completed, and Brian would be adding English subtitles and sipping one of his signature homemade iced lattes with a heaping mound of whipped cream on top. Maybe his face still hurt from the cactus incident and the ice helped keep the swelling down?
Two weeks later I left Santo Domingo with what I thought was a finished film. I went straight to New York where Dan had set up an initial screening for his peers at Columbia. We had no idea what to expect. The version we cut was about 90 minutes long and included a lot about us within the actual film. At the time we thought we had to use our own story as a window into the unfamiliar world of Haiti for our largely American audience. The night of that first screening Dan and I were both shuffling around nervously and just hoping for the best. We stood in the back on complete pins and needles, on the verge of running out of the room in embarrassment. We could barely stand the butterflies. The 90 minutes grinded slowly by and at the end we handed out 3×5 index cards to harvest some feedback from the audience of about 80 people. I was pleasantly surprised by the comments. It seemed that the vast majority of audience members were engaged in the story line and incredibly encouraging about what they had just seen. There were plenty of suggestions for improvement but for the most part the response was much better than we could have expected.
After a couple more small ‘feedback screenings’ we tried to hammer out a second edit of the film but kept running into creative walls. We realized that we had lost the ability to look at this film with a fresh perspective. We couldn’t see the weaknesses in the story line because we had been there when everything was actually happening so it was all crystal clear to us. We realized it was time to get some outside help! I called up a couple of friends from college to help us sort through this cut and help make sense of it all.
Mike Molenda and John Klein, graduates of the Film & Television department at the University of Notre Dame, answered the call. These guys dove into our cut wholeheartedly and didn’t come up for air until they had a much improved version. Seeing potential in our film they brought valuable perspective and pushed us several steps closer to a final product that we could all be proud of. We are grateful for Mike and John’s generosity and know that we could not have reached the point we are at today without their selfless help.
I was living in Berkeley, CA at the time we got this next version of the film. After months of feeling helpless with creating another edit of the film, this version from Mike and John allowed me to see the film with new eyes. It was an exciting time – I holed up in coffee shops all over Berkeley with my laptop and external hard drive, slicing the film up, perfecting the audio mix, and feeding a newfound caffeine addiction. My roommate Cristie Ellis added her knack for storytelling to the mix, sitting with me through several versions and offering great feedback at every turn. There was no real moment when we realized that we had a final version on our hands but somehow it just sort of happened – and it couldn’t have happened without the support of Mike, John, Cristie, and others.
The Launch
A few months later we had our first screening in San Francisco for a small group of friends and the feedback was extremely positive. There was a lot of excitement in the room as people felt as if they had just taken a trip through the Haitian countryside and met some amazing people along the way. We knew it was time to move forward with a broader launch.
What better place to have our world premiere of the film than in San Francisco? On March 12th, 2008 I rented a large room at the historic Fort Mason Center, tracked down some food donations, got the word out amongst friends, and hoped for the best. We ended up having nearly 100 people at the premiere and the atmosphere was just electric! I could not have hoped for a better situation for the premiere of this labor of love that we had been working on for over two years to that point. The film lasted 40 minutes and people stayed after for another 40 minutes to ask questions and talk about Haiti. I was impressed by how well everyone seemed to ‘get it’ as their questions were engaging and well informed. After countless versions of the film, cutting the length of it in half, and begging for help from friends and family, we finally had a film that got our message across crisply and effectively. It was the first time I had a real sense of accomplishment during the entire process and all I could feel was gratitude.
Now it is time to let this baby out into the world! Along the way we have always been the first to admit that we really don’t know what we are doing – that we are just learning as we go. But the one thing that has remained constant is the amazing support of our friends, family, and even complete strangers with this film. I am humbled by your dedicated support and I truly cannot thank you enough. Now is the fun part – let’s make sure that this film is seen by as many people as possible!
To download a .pdf of this story with more photos, click here.
