“Hi Cuba!” shout more than twenty children of between 6 and 10 years of age from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, followed by a “¡Hola Cuba!” While an iPad focuses on them from a tripod the children hold up an enormous pink heart with their signatures and say hello in English and Spanish, the two languages in which they made their videos.
It has been three weeks filming a series of 2-3 minute clips, “video post cards”, for their contemporaries who live in the small town of La Conchita, in the west of Cuba, some 1,400km from the State’s Capital. The answers will begin to be filmed on the 18 July in the Cámara Chica (small camera) studio, belonging to the community project Los Chapuserios.
This action of exchange brought their summer camp in LaBelle Air school, where many students have English as a second language, to a close. The videos are the first step in a budding cultural exchange program that organisers plan to continue for years, reports the website The Advocate. For its part, the children of La Conchita, Pinar del Río, are preparing their own video messages to send to Baton Rouge.
Making this exchange happen was not easy. While La Belle Aire has an optimum internet connection, the connection in La Conchita is very limited, not to mention the costs. For that reason, Alexandra Halkin, director of Americas Media Initiative and its section Cuba Media Project, with significant experience in Cuba, plans to carry DVDs with her to the area in the far west of the island August. In September she plans to return to Baton Rouge with the video post cards what the children of La Conchita are producing in response.
Halkin explains to OnCuba that AMI has been working on Cámara Chica project in La Conchita since 2014. “It makes a lot of sense to keep this cultural exchange with children up if we consider that Cámara Chica is a project where it is the little ones who film their daily reality in Pinar del Río”.
The children hold up an enormous pink heart with their signatures and say hello in English and Spanish. Photo: Bill Feig/ The Advocate
Govani Jiménez (Pipo), director of Los Chapuseros, told OnCuba that “the children are completely nuts.” “It is an opportunity for them to explain what their lives are like and to make new friends”. Pipo explains that the video post cards will be the final activity of the last stage of their workshop: that of editing”.
The idea arose in January when Amy Mitchell-Smith, executive director of the Baton Rouge Cinema Corporation travelled to Cuba as part of a delegation of filmmakers. During the trip she travelled with Halkin to La Conchita, where Cámara Chica has had a notable activity since 2014.
Mitchell-Smith said that the exchange programme will grow with time and might culminate in the children visiting each other’s countries. This is also Alexandra Halkin’s hope that: “what we want is to continue these video post cards and to eventually take the children from Baton Rouge to visit La Conchita”.
Halkin has always insisted that the Cuban audience is one of the most sophisticated and well informed cinema audiences that she has ever met. “You are talking about a population that is incredibly literate, capable of seeing a film and discussing it….”, the director of the cinema in Baton Rouge said when she went to see the children in LaBelle Aire working on their film.
In the final session they put their new knowledge to the test and they did so in front of various visitors – including the Mayor of Baton Rouge, Kip Holden. Halkin thanked them for their work and said that she was sure that it would be well received in La Conchita. “They are very excited over there”, she told them.
