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Posts from the field during pre-production and production.

Principal photography starts tomorrow

10×10 is wheels down in Northern Ethiopia on our first official film production trip. It’s been exactly one year since we first visited Ethiopia to find a girl to represent her country in our film.

With the brilliant writing of Maaza Mengiste as our guide, we’re out to film the story of Azmera, a girl who at the age of just 13, stood up to tradition—and her own mother—and refused to be married off.

Director Richard Robbins checks in today from the road…literally:

As on our previous trips to Ethiopia, we’re grateful to be hosted by the good people of World Vision, a our NGO partner working hard in Ethiopia and around the world to educate girls. You can help World Vision make education a reality for girls like Azmera with a donation today.

January 24, 2012

Hope Village and Badr the Budding Photographer

Badr at Hope Village holding his disposable camera.

Badr with his new camera at Hope Village.

We have returned to Hope Village, an NGO in Cairo where Aya was seeking refuge. Although Aya is no longer here, we were able to visit with many of the children we met during our first trip such as Badr and his siblings. ‘Hope Village’ seems to be the perfect name for this loving community of several homes for women and children. Badr accompanied us as we visited two of these homes, one housing teenage girls, most of whom have experienced gender-based violence and/or rape. However, the girls were the warmest, most jovial, giggly, and open I have seen so far in Egypt.

Although Badr, and his friend Ahmed, could have stayed in the children’s home, they have chosen to live with the teenage girls instead. The boys are little men. They are polite, loving, proud, and protective of these girls they now consider to be older sisters. They grew up fast, and whether or not they live with the girls because they are treated like princes, or whether it’s because they long for a matriarchal figure in their lives, none of it really matters. The love that this little family shares with one another was beyond anything I have ever experienced.

Ahmed and me outside of Hope Village.

It is hard to imagine Badr has had little to no contact with his biological family. Like some of the other boys and girls at the children’s home of Hope Village, Badr, Ahmed, and his sisters were brought to the shelter to be cared for and kept off the streets of Cairo.

Still, this is not a sad place. In fact, it could be one of the most positive environments I have set foot in. Immediately you see children caring for one another and making a family with what they have been given. The three-year-olds rock the two-month-old babies to sleep. The five-year-olds wipe the noses and play with the newborns. The older ten-year-olds tell the seven-year-olds they love them.

Hope Village girls taking pictures with Jenna's camera

Hope Village girls practicing with Jenna's camera.

Having noticed Ahmed’s interest in cameras on our first visit, we made sure to bring some disposable cameras along this time. Instantly, the boys tore through all the shots on the cameras. So we gave them our iPhones, a quick tutorial, and let them go. We were quite impressed with his photos! Badr and the other children had impromptu photo shoots as we continued our tour of the Hope Village girls home, which has a vocational training area allowing the girls to learn basket-weaving, rug-weaving, hairdressing, and candle-making.

After touring the facility, we spent our day dancing, playing, and talking with the children. After playing airplane with almost every child, it was time to say goodbye. None of the children cried when we left. I think that’s because they’re used to people leaving them. They are strong and have enough love in their self-made family to know there was nothing to be sad about. I however, got into the car and had a different reaction.

Enjoy some of Badr’s images below and check back soon to hear more about our time in Cairo!

One of the babies at Hope Village watching our dance party. —Photo by Badr

Badr's sister holding a nursed-to-health baby that had been abandoned in October

Badr's sister taking care of a nursed-to-health baby that had been abandoned in October. —Photo by Badr

One of the older girls at the Hope Village children's center. —Photo by Badr

January 23, 2012

Found, lost, and found again: the challenges of producing overseas

Senna, during our first visit to Peru. Photo by Martha Adams, 10x10.

From the moment Senna’s lips parted to recite a poem for which she took second place in a school-wide competition, Martha and I had a hunch that our writer Marie Arana would find her muse in this 14-year-old wordsmith.

To be perfectly honest, this revelation came as a bit of a surprise. Only minutes before, in a room among her peers, Senna hardly stood out. In fact, she was easy to almost miss. Sitting crumpled in her desk, Senna’s posture suggested a shy girl who wouldn’t reveal much, a girl who had been kicked down—defeated.

Her words suggested otherwise.

Senna is a proud Peruvian who wants to become an engineer and writer—who has faced loss and adversity with resilience. She has spent 13 of her 14 years in the violent mining town of La Rinconada, one of the harshest settings we’ve encountered in our travels. She has seen little beyond its desolate boundaries. Still, no less than five times during our thirty-minute interview did Senna proudly announce, “I am going to succeed in my dreams, I am going to triumph.”

Beneath dramatic snowy caps lies La Rinconada

It’s hard to imagine anyone dreaming about triumph in a place like La Rinconada. From afar, nestled under a snowy peak, La Rinconada can fool you into looking idyllic—like if you squint hard enough you might spot the Von Trapps tramping around in curtain dresses, singing “do-rae-mi.” But without sewage or sanitation and with prostitutes outnumbering schoolchildren, I can assure, this is not the place from which fairytales are made.

On top of that, IT’S COLD. So cold and so frequently snowing, in fact, that it’s unreachable past April. And so, with two more production trips between now and then, before I can even catch my breath from our initial 17,500 ft decent, we must return.

January 19, 2012

10×10′s Quest to Find the Girl: Travel montage

Llamas. Coca leaves. Sewage. 10×10 traverses Peru in search of that one remarkable girl to feature in our film. Follow us in our search by signing up on our mailing list at 10x10act.org and checking out our Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube pages.

Facebook.com/10x10act

Twitter.com/10x10act

Youtube.com/10x10act

January 18, 2012

Where’s Aya? Looking for an Egyptian street kid lost in the Arab Spring

Aya holds up a slate with her name and location during 10x10 interviews.

My heart sank, when I heard the news, but I wasn’t completely surprised. We met Aya, an incredibly bright and curious 14-year-old, on our first visit to Cairo. Aya has been living on and off the streets since she was about 8. One of her favorite places to sleep was under the seats of the trains that she snuck onto from Ramses Station, Cairo’s main hub and a popular hang out for street kids. “I like to ride the trains,” she told us, “because every time I wake up somewhere new, I feel like I am flying.”

Aya had just arrived at the Hope Village shelter for street girls when we met her back in September while we were interviewing girls for the 10×10 film. One month before, she had been found by the shelter’s mobile unit after suffering a violent attack. Aside from forcefully telling the counselors that she had escaped being raped, “I let him hit me, but I did not let him take my honor,” Aya had not revealed many details about her family, or her life on the streets.

So we had no idea what to expect when she sat down for our first interview. The next hour was at once heartbreaking and inspiring for all of us on the 10×10 team. Aya had an intellectual maturity well beyond her years. She was inquisitive and strong in her opinions. Somehow this girl, who had faced hardship beyond what I can imagine, had a voice. She talked about everything from her first crush, “This boy in Alexandria was very nice to me, we walked along the water together, but his father thought I was bad because I lived on the streets,” to patriotism and politics. When asked who in the whole world she wanted to have dinner with, she answered “Mohammed elBaradei, [the Nobel laureate, and potential presidential candidate] because I need to tell him NOT to be president. He is one of the old men. We need a new kind of person in government.”

And when I asked how she knew so much about politics, she stared me down and said simply, “I read the newspapers…Don’t you?” It turns out that because Aya had only been to school for about a year when she was 7, discarded newspapers had taken the place of textbooks as she taught herself to read, and Tahrir Square became her classroom.

Aya’s happiest memory is being with “strong women” at the height of the Arab Spring revolution, so it is likely that the pull of the protests during the parliamentary elections in November was too much for her to resist. Despite the best efforts of the Hope Village mobile units, it has been two months since Aya disappeared.

I hope she took a train to Alexandria to see her crush, or maybe she is just hiding out with other street kids trying to avoid the police sweeps. But I can’t help but worry that she is one of the many anonymous children sitting in jail, or even in a hospital…a victim of the revolution to which she feels so deeply connected.

A week after the November unrest, when Cairo had returned to relative calm, I was sitting in the office in Los Angeles, trying to figure out what to do next, when I was struck by the similarities between Mona Eltahawy, our Egypt writer whom I wrote about yesterday, and Aya. Although one woman comes from a middle class background, is highly educated and well-traveled, and the other a street girl from Cairo with barely a year of education under her belt, they both intensely love their country. And they are both enraged by the years of injustice that women and girls have suffered there. Most importantly, their shared hope for a different future—a better future—pulled them both to Tahrir. And now, one is recovering from two broken arms and the other missing in action.

And so I arrive in Cairo today, where Mona will join me shortly, hoping that we can track down a 14-year-old street girl lost in a revolution.

January 17, 2012

Missing (in) Cairo

I have finally arrived in Egypt for our second pre-production trip. There was a point in November when, in the midst of renewed protests and violence in Cairo, I wondered whether this trip would ever happen.

On the night of November 23rd, 24 hours before I was originally supposed to make this trip, we heard via Twitter that our writer for Egypt, Mona Eltahawy, had been arrested during the demonstrations in Tahrir square.

Through the many tweets that followed, Mona revealed the details of her ordeal, one more horrifying than the next.

During a 12 hour detainment by police, she was blindfolded, both her arms were broken, and she was sexually assaulted.

But Mona, I now know, is unstoppable. After her release she went public to condemn the actions of the military police. I was awed by her fearlessness in speaking out so soon after her attack, but more than a little relieved when I received an email saying, “I’m ok, but I think I may have to come home early. I won’t be very useful to you with 2 casts on my arms.” I wanted her home in NYC safe and, I have to admit, I was not too eager to fly into that chaos. But then another e-mail from Mona followed, “I really don’t want to leave, Tahrir is where I want to be.”

It’s hard for me as an outsider to understand this desire to be there; to put yourself in the middle of a square packed with energized—sometimes angry—always unpredictable hordes of people. But since the very beginning, women, both intellectually and physically have been at the center of what Mona calls “the revolution of the Egyptian mind.”

And as we found out one week later, one of the leading candidates for our film felt the need to be there too.

“Aya is missing,” Noran, our fixer in Cairo called to tell me. “They think she went to Tahrir last week to be part of the demonstrations and now they don’t know where she is.”

We were seriously considering 13-year-old Aya, a street kid in Cairo, to be our heroine for Egypt. But in the midst of the ever-evolving revolution, she’s gone missing.

Tomorrow on the blog: Where’s Aya?