Malena and Butikalé

[This is the second in a series of five blogs in honor of my feature-length drama, Domino:  Caught in the Crisis, which I have very recently completed.] 

Malena opened her shop just two months ago – a courageous move in view of the current crisis.  It´s called Butikalé, and is located in Jerez de la Frontera on a major street two doors down from her father´s bar/restaurant.  She opened it with money that her husband saved, and she runs it with her adult daughter.

The day I interviewed her, she was just opening the store for the day.  There were customers waiting for her to unlock the door…but the two other times that I tried to find her, when her daughter was running the shop, there were no customers at all.

 

Malena in her shop.

The customers waiting for Malena – two women with their children – made some purchases.  One bought a blouse, a pair of long pants, and a necklace which together cost under 10 Euros (about $13).  Clearly, the prices are designed to move merchandise. I´m not sure how she is able to offer these low prices, but she purchases from a distributor in Sevilla and apparently, is getting very low prices herself.

The customer wanted to buy other things, but didn´t have the money.  Malena explained, after the customer had left, that the purchaser had a job with the school district, but the school district was not paying its employees – a shocking but unfortunately common occurrence since the onset of the crisis.

The other customer, also a school district employee (and also not getting paid), made a very small purchase of one necklace for 3 Euros ($5).

Malena commented that yes, the first year is always the hardest for a small business and December and January are the worse months.  She has not yet been able to pay herself any salary at all, but she is covering her costs.

She says that things now are particularly hard.  Many people don´t even have enough money for food, and are going hungry or getting food from charitable agencies (I assume these would be the Catholic charities that are so important here).  And most people don´t have the money to buy clothes for themselves or for their children.

Malena thinks that if things continue on like this for a year or two, people will be patient but if they continue on for, say, five years, there will be a war or revolution.

OUR NEXT POST will be about Francis, the beauty shop owner.

In honor of "Domino:" Small businesses in Spain in the economic crisis

[This is the first in a series of five blogs in honor of my feature-length drama, Domino:  Caught in the Crisis, which I have very recently completed.]

It is ironic, after the so-called “Second Conquest” of Latin America by Spain during the years leading up to the current economic crisis, that the Spanish government is now courting Latin American businesses and asking them to invest in Spain, to save Spain’s economy. 

This may seem even stranger in light of the fact that the backbone of Spain’s economy is not big, multi-national  businesses, but the small mom and pop shops that abound in every neighborhood of the large cities, in every small town.  Some sources have claimed, in obvious exaggeration but with a grain of truth, that these small businesses make up 95% of Spain’s economy.

A stall in the Mercado de Abastos, in the city´s center.

 (Jerez does have supermarkets, but many people prefer to shop in the Mercado de Abastos, open six days a week.  Each stall is run by a different small business and each has its own specialties.)

And why should you, the reader of this article, who does not live in Spain and may never go there, be interested in the situation and problems faced by these small businesses?  You should be interested partly because Spain’s economic problems have an effect on Europe, and Europe affects the rest of the world.  In addition, these small businesses are not all that different from small businesses the world over, and we can learn much from looking at their plight. 

Instead of doing a scientific study, I decided to interview the owners of four small businesses in the southern Spanish city of Jerez de la Frontera, where I was staying, with the idea that this more human look at the situation would be of greater interest.  The four shops I chose are a small clothing/jewelry/cosmetics store owned and operated by Malena, a beauty shop owned by Francis, a paper goods/copy shop/school & office supply store owned by José Luis Delgado Herrerapicazo and his wife, and a bar/restaurant owned by Antonia Balao.

Plaza Plateros, a popular plaza with many bar/restaurants and lots of small shops.

Over the next four weeks, I'll publish each of these stories, one by one, allowing us to see their reactions to the economic crisis and their vision of the future…not a very positive vision.  They are all hurting.

We'll start next week with Butikalé, the clothing/jewelry/cosmetics store owned and operated by Malena.

OUR NEXT POST will be Malena´s story.

Contract with a major distributor, new trailers, etc.

This post will contain a bit of this and a bit of that.

First, we have signed an exclusive distribution contract with a major distributor (Films for the Humanities and Sciences, a division of Films Media Corp.) for the educational version of our two best documentaries on world music and dance:  A Zest for Life:  Afro-Peruvian Rhythms, a Source of Latin Jazz, and Of Beauty and Deities:  Music and Dance of India.

This means that these two documentaries should begin to enter the classroom in a meaningful way, and bring more awareness of some often overlooked aspects of cultural diversity.

A Zest for Life star Lalo Izquierdo with some Afro-Peruvian percussion instruments.

A Zest for Life not only highlights a community and culture that few outside of Peru knows about, but will also underscore Afro-Peruvian's contributions to the world of music, especially in the form of the development of new percussion instruments.  It will also underscore to the American public that the systematic forced importation of Africans brought across the ocean as slaves is not unique to the United States, complimenting Dr. Henry Louis Gates' fine work on this topic.

Of Beauty and Deities will allow students and others to learn more about the huge and important community of people of Asian Indian descent, part of the larger Indian diaspora.  It shows how Hinduism is part of the fabric of the life of many people of Indian descent, and allows for understanding of a beautiful, ancient, and deeply spiritual performance tradition.

The music that accompanies bharatanatyam dance is, like the dance, based on the Natya Shastra.

We are very happy to have this opportunity.

Next, in the interest of informing the general public about the richness of ethnic and cultural diversity in the United States, we are preparing a campaign to inform public libraries of our series, Roots and Branches, which is a series of 30 minute interview shows with people of a very wide range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Our interview subjects are not only ethnically and culturally diverse, they represent a very wide range in terms of career.

To give you a taste of what we are offering in that respect, here is a trailer in which you see excerpts from three of the documentaries.



OUR NEXT POST will be about small businesses in Spain in the economic crisis.

We have finally (Jan. 2013) completed the educational version of our documentary, A Zest for Life: Afro-Peruvian Rhythms, a Source of Latin Jazz.  It has a whole bunch of Extras, including some very interesting interviews with Lalo Izquierdo and others plus some footage of Afro-Peruvian celebrations in Peru, and a trailer about the checo and the angara, both of them percussion instruments.

This DVD is exactly what it claims to be:  an educational version of our documentary, A Zest for Life, completed with closed captions   It´s for libraries, universities, and the like.  If you think it belongs in a library near you, do suggest to them that they visit the web site.  The DVDs sell for $100, but we offer volume discounts to make them accessible to public libraries systems (whose budgets right now are pretty tight).

One thing that makes this DVD important is that it shows that for several centuries slavery, which we in the United States associate with our own southern states, was actually very prevalent in Latin America.  The conditions there were pretty awful.  I mention this because somewhere, a long time ago, I heard that slavery as it existed in Latin America was not so bad as slavery in the United States.  At this point, I can't agree with that statement.

Another reason we made the DVD is simply because it shows there are blacks in Latin America.  Prof. Henry Louis Gates has a fascinating series on the topic which has been airing over PBS stations.  A Zest for Life gives another view, focused specifically on the community's music and dance in one country, Peru.

If you want to know more about Prof. Gates programs, here´s a LINK.  They are very, very good.  And here is a LINK to a short trailer in which Gates summarizes his series.

OUR NEXT POST will be about la Triana, aged five, dancing beautiful flamenco bulerias.

Some photos from a new project we´re starting

I´ve been suffering from a bit of burn-out with these blogs, but follow this LINK and it will take you to some photos of a new project we´re starting.  Called Flamenco:  the Land is Still Fertile (Flamenco:  la tierra está viva), we´ve gotten some RandD money from Media Art Works (MAW) to write the script, make a trailer and put up a simple web site.

The project, undertaken by Palomino Productions, will be jointly run by Antonio de la Malena and yours truly (Eve A. Ma).  Specifically, we are co-authors of the script.  I will be the producer and co-director, and Antonio de la Malena will be the director and co-producer.  Plus he will be the documentary´s narrator, and will sing in it some.  (So will Agujetas, Luis Moneo, etc., etc.--and we´ll have guitarists, dancers, children, old people...this is going to be very good.  But we must obtain money to pay for the production. 

In the meantime, we´ve shot a little, but will shoot more when I return to Jerez...just enough to do the trailer.  After that, well, we don´t have the financing at this point to do any more.  But we do have the agreement of some flamenco heavy hitters to be in the documentary, and we´ve got a great script!

OUR NEXT POST will be about finished the educational version of A Zest for Life:  Afro-Peruvian Rhythms, a Source of Latin Jazz.

The lowdown about "Domino"-as the city of Jerez collapses

We are putting the finishing touches on my dramatic narrative film, Domino:  Caught in the Crisis.  These touches include getting the length absolutely spot on (a requirement for American television stations), having a sound tech go carefully over every second of sound to work magic so that voila, it sounds PERFECT, and having an image person do the same with the image.

Another little matter is that the reaction of the people in the private screening made it clear to me that I needed to add something to make our hero, Luis, really likeable.  I know that I don't much enjoy watching a movie if I don't really like the hero and it's reasonable to believe that lots of other people feel the same way.

That little matter has been taken care of by having Luis say a few key words in a key moment.  I'm not going to tell you how this was done (especially since the actor is in Spain while I'm in California), but we did it.  I'm happy with the results.

Luis (Antonio de la Malena).  Imagine him saying some sympathetic words.  You LIKE this man.  Right?

And sound tech:  well, I know one very good one who wants a whole lot of money to do the work.  I know another one whose work I don't know as well who has offered to do it for me for an extremely reasonable fee.  I'm giving the reasonable fee person a chance, and have my fingers crossed.  If it turns out he can't do the work, I'll move on to the expensive person.

The image problems:  I believe I've solved all but one of the important ones, and I believe I've found someone who will take care of the remaining important problem for me.  Some of this stuff gets to be pretty complex.  You create a mask that changes size and follows a point you set up in the image, and...and....

I am, therefore, still hopeful that Domino will be completed before the end of 2012.

In the meantime, Spain in general and Jerez de la Frontera in particular are falling apart.  (Jerez is where we filmed Domino.)  I'm just going to tell one horror story here to illustrate my point:  for 3 weeks, ending last Thursday, the garbage collectors were on strike.  (I understand the actual garbage collectors were willing to go back to work after only a few days, but their bosses wouldn't agree.) 

I pulled this photo off of a news article dated Nov. 22.

The reason for the strike is that the city wanted to cut 125 of the 400 garbage collection jobs as a budget balancing measure.  For those not mathematically inclined, I'll tell you that that's more than a 25% reduction in the work force.  The deal worked out that ended the strike cut pay checks drastically, but didn't eliminate such a huge chunk of the work force.

Garbage piled up in very large quantities.  Rats began breeding (to say nothing about the odor).  In desperation, people started setting the big garbage containers on fire, which brought out the fire department who, because the people were really angry, had to call in the police to be able to put out the fires.

Think of it for a moment.  Think what it would be like if in your neighborhood, there was no garbage collection for 3 weeks.  Then think what it would be like in the business district, particularly around restaurants.  Then imagine that you are in a place with few trees and less grass, in which many houses go right up to the street and in which things, when not collected, really begin to pile up fast.

By the way, garbage in Jerez is normally collected on a daily basis.  There is one very large garbage container for each block or so, and everyone takes their garbage out in plastic bags and tosses them into the large containers.  And for three weeks....

OUR NEXT POST will be about A Zest for Life in the Berkeley Video & Film Festival (scheduled for 4pm on Sunday, Dec. 9).