Dreams Are Not Forgotten Premiere
Posted on November 29, 2011 - Filed Under Edeyo, NB Videos, Travel Shoots
My second documentary shot in Haiti, Dreams Are Not Forgotten, premieres this Friday in Miami during the fabulous art show of Art Basel. This film like all my documentary films has been a labor of love. I did however take a very different approach with Dreams. The first doc we shot, Haiti: Hunger & Hope filmed in 2008 was about bring the situation in Haiti to people’s attention and highlighting the charity Edeyo which had just built a school in the slum called Bel Air in Port-au-Prince. I appeared in the doc and narrated the whole film to help illustrate the complicated state of affairs that had brought the country to it’s knees. We were there right after the 2008 food riots. We decided to make Dreams Are Not Forgotten with the enormous help of Pamella and Dan DeVos to tell a very different story. Of course Haiti is familiar to almost everybody since the catastrophic earthquake in 2010, but we didn’t want to tell the same old story but rather we wanted to tell a small story of a few individuals striving to live their lives in Port-au-Prince. We chose the slum of Bel Air again but rather than sweeping shots of destruction and chaos that comes to mind and that we highlighted in the previous film, we chose to focus on the intimate and personal nature of life. Waking up in the tent cities and going to school, church, grocery shopping, playing football and straight living…..in the slum. The film looks through the eyes of a little girl called Roodline who was abandoned by her mother after the earthquake and now lives with a teacher and 3 others in a tiny tent near the school she attends, the Edeyo School. We follow a young man called Leslie who has grown up in the ghetto and we reminisce threw the eyes of his step father Roland a 64 year old man who remembers the dreams he had for Haiti and still has for his children. Dreams Are Not Forgotten narrates itself and is beautifully scored by the Brother’s Lit. Haitians are amongst the strongest and most determined people I have ever met and my hope is that this film will help people see we have much in common despite our differences. Most of all we all love, loose and dream.
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I am not a fashion-hyped person and my introduction to Nigel Barker was being dragged by my teen daughter to watch “America’s Next Top Model” with her. Family time.
Seeing Nigel’s humanitarian side is rewarding. As the Director for the Yellow Bandages Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to helping children of terminally-ill parents/guardians, I am pleased to know the glitz of a Hollywood lifestyle has a common/normalized and caring side.
Good luck Nigel
[...] produces documentaries bringing to light the challenges of living in a third world nation, runs his own studio and is a [...]