“Lucila, are you busy this afternoon? You speak Italian and English, don’t you? OK. There are two Italians that would like to meet you”.
This is how it started. A phone call from a priest a morning of 2008.
So, I’ve met Luca (cinematographer) and Alessandro (executive producer) members of the ONLUS Missioni Don Bosco, from Turin. They’ve put me on a trial with a task: write, organize and shoot a short movie in 48 hours.
So I did, and this was the beginning of my collaborations with the Italian and Argentinian’s Salesians.
Back in 2009, the Argentinian Salesian Bulletin, organization that cares about the communication of this ecclesial congregation, called me to be part of a team, composed by young filmmakers and producers, in order to make micro journalistic documentaries about the path of the relics of Saint John Bosco through Argentina.
This religious manifestation has been developed in many countries around the world between 2009 and 2015, such us Italy, USA, Brazil, India, Germany, and others.
In July 2009, Damián Tetelbaum, Matías Baraviera, Lucas Mirabet, Juan José Chiappetti (executive director of the Argentinian Salesian’s Bulletin) and I, began this adventure.
Resources: Minimum (camera, mic and macbook pro)
Schedule: Tight
Satisfaction: Huge
From July to November, organized in teams of two or three people, we shoot in so many places:
- so many little countries outside Buenos Aires
- Cuyo, the argentinian’s Tuscany as for its vineyards and similar landscape,
- all the litoral with its warm people,
- and the northwest of Argentina, which opened up to us and made us feel like home.
The workflow was a little vertiginous. You know, when it comes to news, if you do not get to transmit them quickly, they’ll loose their sense of actuality.
That is why we needed to be extra professionals, organized, with a lot of teamwork. Goals that we've managed to achieve in a short period of time. While a member of the team was shooting, the other one was editing and the other one was uploading the video finished before. Sometimes we even had to edit in the cars while we were moving from one place to the other.
But this did not matter. The crew was passionate, the satisfaction of the final products was plenty, and the life experience that we were going through made us go forward no matter what.
Each village that saw our videos as we were finishing them, requested at the organizers to have also there the “visit” of Don Bosco. We’ve got the chance to meet so many many many beautiful people, so many life stories, so much sufferance, so much joy, happiness and hope.
Near the ending of this experience, I’ve got the chance to shoot the videos from Cordoba to Salta (provinces of Argentina).
We left Cordoba by night, before sunrise in order to be by breakfast time at Villa Atamisqui, in Santiago del Estero, a place where a community of aborigines live. The landscape, the absence of vegetation, the expressions of people’s faces, their eyes, have moved me. They’ve touched my heart.
At the end it always comes to the wise phrase that Luca (cinematographer from Turin) once told me: “The heart will tell you when to start recording. Let your sensitivity drive you”. I know it sounds a bit corny, but when I got it I’ve realized that it’s 100% true.
Let’s let the images speak for themselves.
Written by Lucila Riggio
www.lagiungladigiulia.com
info@lagiungladigiulia.com
