Seeing the Light...

Having forgotten that I created a blog after I put something on the web site, it's been far too long since I've updated folks on our progress.

It's been slow going, but it has felt more important to take the time to weave this story in ways that honor the youth in our film, their communities and the audience.

We hope you will find in this film some hope, inspiration and interest in taking action to create change through music and art or donations to youth like those featured in the film. A few of our advisors who are reviewing segments for us and helping with translations have said that they had no idea that youth could create such beautiful and heartfelt music with great messages in hip hop/rap. And yes, everything will have subtitles, even the English-speakers!

We are glad to share their political and self-expression through their songs and stories. We hope you'll learn a little about their communities and want to explore Latin America, or at least have a new perspective on the region, since our film features youth in Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua and the US.

We hope to have a rough cut by SXSW in March, where I hope to be traveling to promote the film. If you are interested in supporting our efforts, please email me directly and I can direct you to a paypal account if you'd like to make a donation.

I sense that we are close to the end of this journey. Soon it will be over and the film will be shown, hopefully in many venues, and we'll be remembering the beauty of this process, this discovery that is called documentary filmmaking.

It was an insane summer at the community television station I run in Gilroy, CMAP.tv (with a very competent staff) where we trained eight summer youth how to create mini-documentaries, shot 12 hour days at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, and nearly doubled our producers and member services in just a few short months.

I've been the executive director for just under two years, and was just elected to the board of the national Alliance for Community Media (ACM). It's been the most challenging and rewarding two years of my life, and I can't imagine anything else that I'd rather be doing.

I have high hopes for this year as our team takes on new, community-engaging open source tools, new media and technology programs in the schools, and help to pass national legislation to support community television everywhere. Please consider supporting the CAP Act at www.alliancecm.org/cap.

Emery Hudson, my film partner, and I spent the fall working on a very rough cut of the film as he began film school in San Francisco and I traveled back east a few times and to Mexico.

Having logged about 22 tapes with over 14 hours of footage, hours and hours of translation, and written the scripts, we're now assembling segments of the film and planning to have a presentable rough cut within two months. Currently we have a 15-minute version, and the final version will likely be a 30-minute piece.

Since we both have commitments outside of our work on the film and live two hours away from each other with three different versions of Final Cut Pro, it can be tough to stay on the same page. But we're lucky to be a great team, communicating well, and having different strengths.

I can always count on Emery to apply his technical editing in an incredibly artistic and visually captivating way, and he knows he can count on me to keep us focused on whose story we are telling and how we are telling it.

That's where we are at. Soon we'll be putting together a marketing strategy and a fundraising plan, and will likely be asking you and everyone we know to support our efforts.

Hope you'll consider supporting the film!

Happy New Year! I think it's gonna be a great one...

-Kathy