Supporting Zambia from Afar
BY MARGARET BEHNKE, CHIPPEWA FALLS, WISCONSIN, USA - I live in Wisconsin and I have been supporting the Zambian filmmaking effort from afar. I went to high school and college with Cyndi Greening. I have known her for over thirty years. Cyndi has loved filmmaking and teaching for as long as I have known her. When she takes on a new project and commits herself to it, there is a lot of passion and activity that begins to swirl around her.
A few weeks ago, she asked me to join the effort to find filmmaking equipment to leave behind in Zambia. My task was to search the web and ferret out contact points with these manufacturers. It sounded like an easy task. It turned out to be much harder than I imagined. Companies can have a very public face on the web but these faces are more like a kabuki mask; they look friendly but completely obscure what is behind them. Panasonic, Sony, Sennheiser, Canon, Adobe, the Gates Foundation. None had readily accessbile contact information. Fortunately, I can be pretty determined so I was not easily stopped. I was able to find information from nearly every major manufacturer. I've now passed that on to Cyndi so she can send proposals, press kits and all that sort of thing.
Today, I got the party invitation for the Zambian gathering on Saturday. Needless to say, it would be pretty expensive for me to get to Arizona. I also don't eat meat so the menu isn't appealing, either. It's just torture for me to be so far away. I really wanted to go to Zambia and work with the crew. My husband was very supportive of the idea. Like Cyndi, I thought it would be wonderful to assist Jabbes in his effort to get his film made. I was excited to look for equipment for future Zambian filmmakers. It's just agony to stay behind.