Announcing our new partnership with Los Afro -Latinos! Los Afro-Latinos will provide us with a monthly series that will highlight Afro-Latinos and their experiences within the broader Latino community. Read on for a taste of what’s to come:
So, you want to make a documentary film. Should be pretty easy, right? Just grab your camera, shoot, edit and you’re done. Not so fast. The multi-layered processes associated with making a film tends to be a bit more complicated and peppered with lots of starts and stops, especially financing issues. Plus everything else imaginable and some things you just can’t imagine.
In the world of filmmaking, taking on the untold story, the unimaginable and the unthinkable are often what makes film projects so incredibly appealing. Capturing history — whether its life’s smallest moments or biggest events– is often the attraction.
New Yorker Sisa Bueno, an adventurous Latina of African descent and a self-described political junkie, is learning first hand about the starts and stops of filmmaking. As a graduate of the prestigious New York University Film School, Sisa admits, “I had the naïve thought that documentaries were much easier than traditional fiction films, which is completely untrue.”
After graduation, Sisa decided, “ I’ll do a documentary. I’ll go there (Bolivia) and I’ll shoot it. It will take me three months. No, it will take me a year. I’ll be fine. I’ll be done by the age of 27. I was 23 when I did this…I’m 29 right now and I’m still not done.”
It’s even more complicated when your subject may not have widespread commercial appeal. For Sisa, the focus of her film is a group of Bolivians who until recently were both unknown and ignored: Afro-Bolivians.
Her documentary We of the Saya is a firsthand, up-close look at the day by day challenges encountered by Bolivia’s African descendents as they seek full-recognition and to be counted as individuals in the country’s newly constructed constitution. It’s about their struggle for the most basic of human rights: equality.
Read the rest of this article at Los Afro-Latinos.
Filmmaker Sisa Bueno is currently raising funds to complete production of We of the Saya through a Kickstarter campaign. The campaign’s goal is to raise $6,725.00 by July 11, 2012.
For more information and to financially support this project, please click here.
www.losafrolatinos.com is a blog following the Afro-Latino experience.
About Cindy Tovar
How wonderful that someone thought of doing a documentary about Afro- Bolivians.
I can’t wait to see it!
Here’s to a great partnership between Being Latino & Los Afro-Latinos! So proud to be the first feature in this collaboration…We ? nuestra Comunidad! Amig@s, we have ONLY HOURS LEFT in our Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for editing. Can you donate & spread the word? Every little bit helps. Mil gracias!
http://kck.st/N6uNrc
LAST CHANCE to win tickets to any show on the Enrique/JLo tour!!
Enter here: http://bit.ly/eijlowin
Spread the word and good luck! <3
I look forward to the day when Latinos of African descent will no longer be forced to hyphenate themselves. You never see European-Latino, Mestizo-Latinos, or Indigenous-Latinos. It is only our black brothers and sisters who bear the burden of the hyphen to remind them of their place in the Castas system which is socially enforced and embraced in many parts of Latin America.