French/Bolivian Co Production ?

Images of Bolivia.

This is what I read today about the Bolivian film industry:

Some Final Maybes

Making a movie in Bolivia may no longer be the impossible adventure it was considered to be some years ago. Maybe to make a movie in Bolivia is not equivalent anymore to building an airplane in a car garage. But as the recent unevenness of Bolivian cinema suggests, maybe its future depends on some more modest measures. Let’s name one: go back to the desk, sit down, and start writing and rewriting stories that are worthwhile to tell.

Approximately one movie a year is made in the county.
It was my dream to have the film and French/Bolivian co production.
Hmmmmm.

Hana, heart knots.

Hana needs to soften the heart knots.
She needs to become curious not furious.
She needs to learn how to let herself off the hook.
She needs to learn 'every decision I make is a choice between a grievance and a miracle.'
Deepak Chopra.

“True forgiveness is not an action after the fact, it is an attitude with which you enter each moment.”

-David Ridge.

This is the challenge and the quest Hana's needs to embark on.
With clarity, she will learn to see the bigger picture of her fear, her guilt, her chronic low self esteem. Then she'll be ready to walk though a new door into a new life. Then she'll have tasted miracles.

My challenge: how does she believably get clarity ? How does she change her attitude towards herself?
I really don't want to make her a detestable person to start off, but Hannah Margaret was anything but nice: passive aggressive!

Hana, a passive aggressive when we first meet her as 58 year old ?

3.30. Another breakthrough !!

Love how this happens so 'accidentally.'
I've been reading reviews of award winning world cinema films this afternoon. One of my favorites is the Russian movie The Island. Riveting and such a clever surprising ending. I discover it has won a string of awards.

In Hana's journey with Samira to Bolivia to find long lost estranged daughter Shifra, it will appear that Hanna isn't going to make it.
Everything suggests she will have to give up and go home. What could this event be?

An illness? Altitude sickness, heart attack?
A communication from Shifira she won't see her mother?
Might she lose Smaira in the chaos of La Paz?

Or all three ?
Something must happen to make her heroes journey all the more heroic at the end.

The film needs to be deeply poetic, deeply engaging, deeply moving. And believable.

Creating Hana

What does she want?

What does she need?

What is she prepared to do to get what she wants?

What’s her body language?

Facial expressions?

Gestures, posture, distinctive mannerisms?

What does she want?
She wants to be free of her guilt , her nightmares, her inner demons.

What does she need?
She needs to come down form her head into her heart.

What is she prepared to do to get what she wants?
She is prepared to take a risk and trust the shaman who tells her she has to find her abducted granddaughter if she has any hope of peace.

Hana changed.

Hana's character arc

Drawing by Jim di Bartolo

Is this Joel? Does Hana's friend need to be a man, Joel the manservant?

Hana will have a huge tidy studio. This is the one part of her life she can control and order.


Hana's character arc.

OH BLISS and JOY! Thank you Jurgen, I now have a new ending for the film. You've done it again.
Another new breakthrough.
Hana will have to find her inner hero !
What a fab way to end.
Never ever thought of this. Makes so much sense.
Hana has to come though her quest for peace (which actually turns out to be a quest for atonement), a new person.



So is this believable? A ten year old child walks out of Auschwitz with her grandmothers sketchbook sewn in inside of her little blue coat. She does not recover from the fear of losing her family, and as a result, becomes insomniac, has an obsession for locking doors, is incapable of sexual intimacy, doesn't know how to give love to her daughter, loses self respect, and desperately seeks approval through her art. Hana at the end of the film will find her own inner heroine.

We need to know about Hana's life before we interrupt it with the crisis.
Point three of the story is a good place to start.
The ideal ending is surprising.

Coincidences are fine to get the character into trouble , but not out of it.

The moral or the theme of the story should be ever present n your thoughts as a writer.

So, Hana will a have crisis on the death of Susanita, and by chance finds the shaman who tells her she must find Samira and Shifra and make amends, otherwise she will die a terrible death of osteoarthritis.

Hana will return from finding Shaifra in the slums of Bolivia to Paris to start a musical school with Samira, for street kids.

Sub plots: Smaira's desire to find her parents. Birth mark. Longing, yearning for wholeness.
Shifra's brokenheartedness and atonement work with slum kids. Guilt, and disappointment in her parents. sub theme.. parents are not what we would have wanted...

Hana's lack of confidence in her art and her longing to sing.

The Light and Dark of Hana

I hour goal:
Review yesterday...build on yesterday.

Goal for the day:
Get to know Hana, the light and the dark of her...

The last two images are by the extraordianry artist William T Ayton.
The first photo is of Sonia Delaunay, then the next four images are hers.

Hana has become hopeless. This will drive her eventually to meet the shaman.  

Synonyms for hopeless: bad, beyond recall, cynical, dejected, demoralized, despairing, desperate, despondent, disconsolate, discouraging, downhearted, fatal, forlorn, gone*, goner, helpless, ill-fated, impossible, impracticable, in despair, incurable, irredeemable, irreparable, irreversible, irrevocable, lost, menacing, no-win, past hope, pointless, sad, shot down, sinister, sunk, threatening, tragic, unachievable, unavailing, unfortunate, unmitigable, up the creek, useless, vain, woebegone, worsening
Antonyms: auspicious, bright, encouraging, expectant, hopeful, optimistic, promising, propitious, rosy. This will be her character arc.

Todays Intentions take a turn

I start today with a wonderful view of the full moon though my bedroom window. Bliss and Joy! I take lots of photos. I Hike. I meditate, I pray. Breakfast. Upload photos. Loose photos. Feel stumped. I also loose neighbors dog on my hike. I saw 'The Fox.'The mysterious neighbor who only comes out at night, and also at dawn it seems. I saw the mysterious light again. Email from Jurgen. Feel he will be my next mentor. Feel he is my mentor already.

So let's make an intention for the next hour:

Work/play on intro, and make decisions how Hana will meet the shaman. This will be the inciting incident.

Goal for today.

Decide on the inciting incident.

Two hours later.

Right. As so often happens, the Universe has a different goal!

I got sidetracked by looking at and reading parts of Freidl Dicker Brandeis extraordianry life. Freidl, when she was summoned to a concentration camp, packed her suitcase full of art materials so that she could teach the children to paint, and give them a means of expressing themselves.

I seem to be searching for a title for the film. This feels very important. Everything feels like it needs to hang from this. I scour the pages of Freidl's book.

UPROOTED.

In renaming Anabel Hana, I've been reminded of one of my guardians Hannah Margaret Stewart.
Hana in the film needs a friend, good or bad, and in remembering Hannah Margaret, I have the motive for Hana's most evil of act's: the collusion in the abduction of her granddaughter Samira.

Jealously.

This is what Hannah Margaret gave me in large dollops every day of my childhood. Non acceptance. Hana's daughter will prefer Hildegarde,( will have to rename her), Hana's kind loving religious Bolivian housekeeper who has always adored Shifra unconditionally. Hana is incapable of showing love to her daughter after her holocaust experiences as a child. She is emotionally paralyzed.

Pitch:

Through her graphic sketchbooks and paintings elderly wealthy lonely widowed French Holocaust survivor artist Hana battles with inner demons in a last attempt to find atonement for her part in the abduction of her granddaughter eighteen years previously. After the death of her beloved companion Hildegard,though an unlikely chance meeting with a Bolivian shaman, Hana finds her gifted singer granddaughter Samira in the slums of Paris and embarks on an intrepid healing journey to Bolivia (with Samira) to find her estranged daughter Shifra, who they discover teaching circus skills and painting to slum kids in La Paz.

Serious procrastinating, and then...

This is my writing table with the beginnings of storyboarding the film.

Some very serious procrastinating was going on this morning. Why? I don´t know. I was up at 7.15 waiting for dawn to arrive to set off for my hike. I got up before sunrise so that I could start earlier on the screenplay. What's happened? Nothing. I got well into procrastinating once again.

Then... at about 11.45, Breakthrough !
How?
I made myself sit down and look at one scene, no more than one scene, it was the intro.

The intro needs to zoom into Hana's studio. This will set the tone of the film and tell the audience the story is something to do with an artist. Maybe we can see train tickets for Paris in her hand. On Hana's easel is a large painting. It's in a style similar to Chagall. It tells the story of Samira's abduction, and Hana's grief. I check Chagall out on line and am reminded he was Jewish, and that he held an unwavering belief in the existence of miracles and in the infinite wisdom of the creator. His life has been described as an Ode to Joy. We share the same birthday!

Oh happy day!