Wow. Who knew that fundraising was so hard? I mean, I knew. I did. Now I know more.

I just got one mantra: for the buzos. For the buzos. For the buzos.

Here’s some more behind the scenes!!!!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/izaca/100-fires-living-from-a-landfill

For those of you who are not new, major things have been happening since last I wrote. In terms of travel, I went to Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Qatar, Dubai, and Kazakhstan. In retrospect this sounds crazy, but it wasn’t.

Most recently – the rest can bubble up to the surface when appropriate – I went to Kazakhstan to do some ethnographic work for an educational company. Kazakhstan blew me away – talk about undiscovered. It’s the 9th largest country in the world, larger than Western Europe!, and almost no ones knows about it beyond the asinine impressions of one movie (to remain unnamed). If I get a look of recognition it’s usually because they’re thinking of another ‘stan (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan…). “Stan,” actually, means, “land of.” Kazakh, means, “the free” so literally, Kazakhstan means “Land of the Free.”

It’s a wide, open expanse of steppes, my new personal definition for infinity. The south backs up to breathtakingly beautiful snow-capped mountains… the northwest has a canyon as big as our Grand Canyon, and in between… more steppe. I made a short video of my 6 days there (to be continued hopefully in a few months with much more in-depth research): http://www.izaca.com/films_6days.php
But I’ll pick up my stories from Kazakhstan in the next one. Back to Kickstarter here. For real.

I’m getting my panties all up in a twist. Seriously. Every backer that gets on board makes me smile uncontrollably. Support, even in the smallest doses, can me so much in the big lonely underfunded world of documentary filmmaking. THANK YOU!

Now, MORE!

I will be posting another behind the scenes tonight about me in the trash, filmming, looking v. dirty

Kids were crawling over me all the time when I was shooting… I just tried to incorporate them after a while otherwise I just couldn’t work. I realized after a while that incorprating them in this way was involving them in the process. I was letting them “inside” my camera and letting them own a part of the picture… a camera can be a powerful gun you aim at people unless you let them in behind it. Anyways, there is a caveat to doing that… kids touch everything. So I did have to balance letting them near me and keeping them engaged in front of the camera away from me.

ALRIGHT! We got $945 so far!!!

THANK YOU SO MUCH for all the backers so far on the project! We’ve reached almost $1000 and counting!!!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/izaca/100-fires-living-from-a-landfill

Thank you so much for forwarding onto friends and family and whatever outreach you’ve been able to give me beyond your direct contributions which mean the world to me (and more so, to the buzos).

Major props, a zillion thanks, Happy Holidays, Kicks, Hi-Fives, and not necessarily in that order to each and everyone of you. For those whom I don’t know directly, lets fix that. You’re on my team now.

Abrazos de mi corazon
Isabelle

PS. Y’all have any questions or ideas for better rewards, people to contact, companies to reach out to , WHATEVER, email me!

Isabelle@izaca.com
www.izaca.com
twitter.com/izacafilm
www.100firesfilm.com

http://www.facebook.com/pages/100-Fires-Living-from-a-Landfill-or-The-Living-Dead/111238415564383

Short of it: Awesome New Trailer and a Kickstarter Campaign to Boot, CHECK IT:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/izaca/100-fires-living-from-a-landfill

Life is raw. Imagine that you can’t read or write. The only job you can find is picking through other people’s garbage. Your life depends on what you find: whether it’s plastic bottles or cans, old shoes, or salami covered in flies. Along the way you get infected from hospital needles, burned by trash that’s caught fire, cut from shards of metal, and poisoned with constant diarrhea from rotten food. You even find amputated arms and legs. You continue because everything you come across has the potential for pennies, and you build your dollar a day piece by piece.

100 Fires: Living From a Landfill is a feature length documentary about the smoking dump that crouches outside the city of Santiago in the Dominican Republic. The film follows the buzos, or trash divers, who support themselves solely off what they can scavenge from the dump. They build their houses out of trash, feed their children with rotten food, and make less than a dollar a day by finding and selling piles of metal, plastic, cardboard, and anything else people will buy. We want to give voices to this community; ignored by their own government, invisible to society, and threatened by the toxic dump upon which they rely for survival.

What we need:
Filming for 100 Fires is complete. We now need your help for post-production. Funds will be used for offline/online editing, coloring, and sound composing, engineering, and mixing. We will also use the funds for DVD graphic art, DVD printing, and film festival submission fees.

CHECK OUT THE VIDEO OF ME TALKING!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/izaca/100-fires-living-from-a-landfill

Stripped to my underwear, I follow the fat lady through an old short wooden door into the sauna room where everyone (all women) is sweating, hot, dripping. Beautiful old tiles line the floor, the walls, and the thick curved ceiling has holes small and deep enough to allow light and ventilation but to prevent any unwanted attention. I’ve entered a hammam, which most of you might know by the name of Turkish bath, or, think of a spa.

I get my own sink, a low marble stone basin, filled with the hot water I’d been craving all week (maybe I’m becoming a pansy but cold showers every morning was getting to me). I dunk myself with a couple cups of water and then I’m motioned over to lie flat on the stone floor (very comfortable). She begins to scrub me down like I’ve never been scrubbed before. Piles of skin come off – I feel dirty although I know I’m not – and she exclaims something in Arabic that must have been like

“Girlfriend – what is this mess? Get yo’self to a hammam more often, look at your skin!” after which she gives me a toothy smile.

I’m pretty good with this kind of thing, but I’m still a little shocked by the intimacy. Two women in front of me are doing the same thing to each other, and I hear them asking something loudly to the woman serving me. If only I knew what they were saying at the time.

Next, I get my feet scrubbed, and an oily massage, and some (locally made) olive based (beyond organic) soap to wash everything off. My skin is soft like its never been before, and I smell delicious. I’m pretty relaxed up to this point. I take a towel and head into their chill out lounge (which is actually the welcome-and-exit room). I casually ask how old the place is, because it looks exactly the same as a hammam I visited in Lebanon the week before in the Betadine Palace. The answer? 850 years old. My jaw drops. This bathhouse is older than colonial America.

I sit down, start to dry, jaw still open, and ask for Zurahat tea, which is a type of wildflower. It’s yummy. Things are perfect. I’m in heaven.

And then a fight breaks out.

I had noticed in the back of my mind that the air of the place seemed a bit strange… the ladies were all talking loudly to each other, but I really can’t understand mostly anything except the occasional word so I wasn’t paying any attention. Plus my guard wasn’t up – I had just had it beat out of me. But at some point I clued in when the manager of the hammam grabbed the shoes of a couple of girls and threw them on the wet floor. This provoked an immediate reaction from one of the said girls, who were still naked, to throw herself at the manager and try to hit her. The whole thing escalated in seconds and both (almost naked) women were being restrained by other women and were yelling at the top of their lungs.

Myself mostly undressed I quickly throw my clothes on, retrieve my shoes and high-tail it across the room as the fight was migrating my way within seconds. Big breasts were swinging, high voices were shrieking, and I really honestly thought the naked girl was going to punch the manager. The space was small, I didn’t want any trouble in case police got involved, so I beat it. Plus, I really didn’t know what was going on.

Later I learned that the girls were Moroccan, and to the insistence of the manager and everyone translating the story to me, they were prostitutes. They got upset when they saw me getting better treatment and argued with the manager, whom I imagine, must have insulted them hence the intense reactions from both sides. I really don’t know what the story is in the end, nor which side to take as its unclear whether they were actually badly treated or not, wether they had an attitude problem or not, or wether the manager was badly stereotyping them or not. Who knows.

In any case, this started off my tour of Syria with a bang. More stories to come in a flash.