Anne Makepeace - County Filmmaker to Speak

By Rebecca Ransom

Torrington- Sometimes the hardest thing is simply doing nothing at all.
Award winning writer, director, and producer Anne Makepeace was in the midst of filming Adan, a Somali Bantu refugee and recent American immigrant ,as he struggled to pay for a meager supermarket order. “All I would have had to do is hand him five bucks and the whole thing could have been fixed in 30 seconds,” Ms. Makepeace said. “I almost did. My cameraman had to stop me.”
Describing the filming of her recent documentary, “Rain in a Dry Land”, which follows two Somali Bantu families as they make their way from the refugee camps in Africa to a new life in urban America, Ms. Makepeace noted there were many moments her stoicism wavered behind the lens. “…When do you intervene? When do you help? When do you just let the camera roll?”
On Wednesday evening, Jan. 31, Ms. Makepeace will discuss her work as a filmmaker and the award-winning documentary, “Rain in a Dry Land”, as part of the Litchfield County Writers Project spring lecture series, “Filmmakers of Litchfield County”. The series has an emphasis on human rights issues in film. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will take place from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. at The University of Connecticut’s Torrington campus.
A Lakeville resident, Ms. Makepeace said she “became obsessed with this project” after reading a front-page article in the New York Times in 2003, which told of the “imminent immigration” of thousands of families from the war-torn African nation. The story struck her - How would the Somali Bantu people- a largely illiterate, underclass, and oppressed Muslim faction, many of whom had never seen indoor plumbing, two-story buildings, or television- adjust to western culture?
She traveled to the refugee camps in Kenya and found two families scheduled to immigrate to America. One was headed for Atlanta, Georgia, the other, Springfield, Massachusetts. Originally, Ms. Makepeace wanted to film refugees headed for Holyoke, Massachusetts, but after a city-wide firestorm of anti-Muslim, anti-black reactions, the city refused to resettle the influx of families. Eventually, nearby Springfield offered to accept the immigrants.
The documentary, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006 and will be shown on PBS 2007 Point of View series, chronicles the struggles and triumphs of the two, very distinct families. “This is a film about families,” Ms. Makepeace commented. “These families have gone through struggles we can’t imagine, but they are still families…these are human stories of families in extremes.”
Ms. Makepeace hopes the film changes audiences’ perspectives. “My hope is when people see an African janitor (as is the single-mother Arbai of Atlanta) cleaning a bathroom, that they will realize there is a huge story behind everyone in that situation…courage, struggle…” There is this invisible underclass in this country, she noted, and documentaries like “Rain in a Dry Land” make these people visible, “less of ‘the other’ to us”.
For a complete LCWP series schedule or for more information, visit www.lcwp.uconn.edu or call the LCWP at 860 626 6845.
For more information on Ms. Makepeace, visit www.makepeaceproductions.com

Posted with the permission of The Litchfield County Times.
Anne Makepeace - County Filmmaker to Speak - Friday January 26 2007 - page 4