Landon Van Soest and Jeremy Levine’s Good Fortune

Screening: Wed, June 24: 6:30 pm *Intro/Q&A with filmmakers and special guests

Hot off their Witness Award win at Silverdocs Landon Van Soest and Jeremy Levine are bringing their film about development in Kenya to the NYC chapter of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. The film which looks at two Kenyans battling to save their homes. The first is Silva, a woman who lives in a larger squatter village in Nairobi that is going to be torn down.  The second, Jackson, is contending with a huge American developer that wants to flood the area surrounding his farm in order to make a larger rice farm for the community.

Through these two characters and the landscapes of their homes, Good Fortune becomes a beautifully shot look at the complexity of larger scale development, who it affects and whether or not the ends justify the means. I recently had the opportunity to ask Landon and Jeremy some questions about the film and what we can all do to help in Africa.

TP: How did the project come about and why did you choose Kenya to explore the issue of development?

GF: I had the opportunity to travel through the developing world quite a bit in college (including a semester abroad in Kenya with the ‘School for International Training’ and developed a strong interest in international development). Like many Western travelers, I was deeply affected by the images of extreme poverty around the world and wanted to learn more about what I could do to help. But the more time I spent visiting aid organizations and hanging out in the communities they were working in, the more I felt inclined to look back on ourselves as Westerners, and the impact our interventions were actually having. All too often, there seemed to be an unfortunately disconnect between the lofty intentions of the aid organizations and the actual lives of the people they were aiming to benefit…seemed worth exploring.

Why Kenya? Well, the truthful answer isn’t so interesting (because I’d been a student there and had in-roads), but I can say that Nairobi has often been referred to as the “NGO capital of the world” and the number of outside humanitarian organizations working there is astounding. Among a million smaller organizations, the UN has a huge headquarters there, as does the CDC, etc, etc.

TP: How did you find your characters?

GF: As you’re probably aware, I spent about a year researching a completely different film, but just before I went into production another film came out that was my idea almost exactly and went on to be nominated for an academy award…so I went over to Kenya on a Fulbright (that I’d gotten for my original idea) with a year to shoot a film and no real idea what film I was going to shoot. So I started traveling around the country and quickly connected with an amazing guy named Benard Ohanga at a local university.

So much of the film is really to his credit, as he agreed to take two months off of work to travel around the country with me, go to visit large-scale development projects, and talk to local people about the impact they were having. So we literally took this 2-month long trip on cramped chicken buses, boats, bicycles, and foot to go talk to as many people as we possibly could and ultimately landed on 5 main subjects that I followed for the rest of that year, which was narrowed down to 3 on subsequent trips, and 2 of them made it into the final film.

TP: Both Silva and Jackson (and their families) talk about their distrust of the government and of outsiders, how did you get them to trust you?

GF: I think there’s really 2 reasons. First and foremost, I had incredible help from local people. Benard was amazing in helping to locate people and put the wheels in motion, but after that the people I worked with were almost entirely very local, in most cases my translators/sound recordists, etc. were subjects’ neighbors and relatives, so hopefully they were put at ease as much as possible.

The second thing is that I spent A LOT of time in the communities (about 2 years in total) and got to be pretty well known. At the beginning there was a lot of controversy, mainly because of the perceptions of my subjects’ neighbors. In Yala, a number of people were convinced I was a spy for Dominion, a few of them even confronted me about it. In Kibera, several of the neighbors thought that by virtue of being white I must be giving Silva a lot of money that she was somehow hoarding to herself. And all of my characters quit on me at one point or another because they were being shunned by their neighbors. But as time went by, I had the chance to talk to a lot more people, they saw my face repeatedly for months—and I can say I spent well over half my time just doing general “diplomacy”—the communities really came to trust me, develop pet names for me, and make fun of me a lot behind my back.

TP: It seems like the stories of Silva and Jackson are the stories of a lot of people in Kenya and Africa in general. Were there any stories you followed but didn’t end up using in the film?

GF: It’s true, I really wanted to tell the story from the perspective of the “every man” in Africa, though I have to say, Jackson and Silva both proved to be incredibly intelligent, thoughtful people and both were pretty prominent in their communities.

And yes, there were several other people we followed that got cut from the film. One of the stories I followed about a fisherman and his two wives, was really rich, with a bizarre international/ecological history, and full of interesting personal twists. We tried for two years to fit it into the film, but ultimately decided that it would stand better alone, so you can look for another short film this fall (plug! plug! plug!). I also spent quite a bit of time looking at the sugar industry in Western Kenya, following a relatively wealthy sugar farmer and a laborer with two small children. That was a pretty interesting story too, but a little slow and academic, so I was convinced to cut it earlier on.

TP: What was the hardest part about making the film?

GF: EVERYTHING! Working in Kenya was rife with challenges and trying to put together a film in another language (or several other languages!) with no money and hundreds of hours of footage was no small task either.

I was blackmailed by local officials, administrators, and even my own interns, my computer was stolen (then miraculously recovered), I was forced to hold my camera together with gaff tape after it nearly broke in half (another time it was almost completely submerged in water, but somehow came back to life a day and a half later), and was diagnosed with malaria more than once.

But I can’t even begin to describe some of the incredible experiences production afforded my personally, witnessing a child being born in the home of a good friend, getting stranded in Jackson’s home after rains turned the soil to ankle-deep mud, my translator getting into a knife fight with a Maasai man who cut off four of his fingers, witnessing an HIV diagnosis, and even just the quiet moments watching the sunrise as Jackson pushed his cattle into the swamp or drinking tea and watching Bruce Lee movies with Silva in her home. The process had a profound impact on me personally and apparently I left a bit of a legacy behind as well; there is now a boat, a cow, and even a child bearing my name in Kenya.

TP: How did you get Dominion to agree to be in the film. You don’t paint a pretty picture of the work they do.

GF: Honestly, I think they were the most willing and easiest people to work with in the entire process. Dominion had already gotten a lot of bad press locally in Kenyan newspapers and it seemed like they went on a pretty widespread PR campaign…they took out a big insert in the local newspaper (which you see Jackson reading in one of the scenes) and even bought an hour of air time on a local television station to screen what was essentially an infomercial (though surprisingly well produced!). Dominion really believes in what they’re doing and there are an awful lot of people that share their philosophy; African politicians really push “direct foreign investment” as a key to stimulating the economy and developing rural areas, and you really can’t argue with some of their results. So I really didn’t set out to demonize Dominion, I just wanted to focus on people at the ground level, and they obviously didn’t have the best opinion of the company.

TP: The film makes the point that often those who want to help in places like Africa actually end up creating more problems. If someone did want to help the people of Kenya, how could they go about doing so in a way that is actually beneficial to the common people?

GF: Well Gina, I’m glad you asked that. My greatest fear is that western audiences will watch the film and throw their hands up, which isn’t my intention at all. But I feel pretty strongly that the answers for Africa can only come from Africans themselves, and anything that we try to impose on other people is inherently flawed. So the best thing we can do is to support local initiatives and help communities grow according to their own values. There are a number of smaller organizations (Heifer International, Kiva.org, etc.) that work according to these principals—the whole micro-finance branch of aid—and some are obviously better than others. Supporting access to education and healthcare seem to be pretty universal needs as well, so you can’t really go wrong there. We are working to put together a web-based resource for viewers to get more involved in these issues, but until that’s up, all I can really say is do your research!