Documentary on tsunami wins plaudits at Cannes
Updated
A documentary of four volunteers who went to Sri Lanka to help in the aftermath of the 2004 Asian tsunami is riding a wave of its own at the Cannes Film Festival.
Presenter: Bo Hill
Speakers: Director "The Third Wave" Alison Thompson.
THOMPSON: I really thought I was going for two weeks and I just took a little tiny camera and I thought well I'll take some shots of the destruction and come back and have a little fundraiser and get some money for them and we got there and we got there and there was just so much destruction it was so big, thousands upon thousands of miles that there weren't enough people helping and in our area there was... we ended up with 3,000 people running a refugee camp and we'd go back to the guest house and we'd come to the village and they'd just be waiting for us every day with no food, no water and and still hundreds of bodies on the ground so we just ended up staying, being in charge.
When I got back home after 14, 15 months and I had hundreds of hours of footage and I was still not quite sure what the story was because it could have been cut in so many different directions and over a period of 15 months, but I chose to go with the first five months and the key element being volunteerism and that everybody's needed because going through September 11 and tsunami like they just keep saying, I met so many people and they said you need a masters degree to get into this organisation and that and I'm like, "No, it doesn't take any skills to hand out water or give someone a hug." Everyone is needed that is the clear message.
HILL: After you came back from Sri Lanka you criticised the large international aid organisations do you still share those concerns?
THOMPSON: Yeah, I try not to point fingers and in the film we try not to do that. I try not to even say names but I know but I know exactly which ones are working and which aren't because the thing we notice in these disasters is it's just so much bureacracy you need to get in there, you need cash in your pockets you need to buy supplies and it needs to be able to work in a very simple way and sometimes the big organisations.
I mean they're really there to help and they're really trying but they're just stuck in bureacracy because we would go and build a toilet - they would have to go and write 20 emails back to their head offices and it would take them six months to get permission to build the toilet. Of course there's many advantages and disadvantages for the individual volunteer and the aid organisation and they're both equally needed
HILL: Our news services have been filled with the cyclone in Burma and the earthquake victims in China - it's quite poignant that your film has been singled out at Cannes.
THOMPSON: It's worrying me deep inside, I've been in Burma many times I have such a love for the people of Burma, so I was like 'Do I go there, or do I come here' and then I was like 'You know what, I need to have an international platform, I need to appeal to the journalists and say look we need to, you need to go back and tell this story, you can go back and do a story on some drunken actress at Cannes or whatever but there's responsibility for you guys to go and print it to the world adn to try and get some pressure on the junta to step aside and let the aid in.
HILL: Are there plans to go back to show the villagers of Peraliya your film?
THOMPSON: Well they don't have movie theatres in this village, I guess.
HILL: You built a toilet... surely you can build a movie theatre.
THOMPSON: Yeah we could do an outdoor screening or something like that. Definitely will. First it will start off in theatres in the US and we will go over there and have a screening, it just has to be the right timing because they're so traumatised this village, those 2,500 people and they're still very, very scared of tsunami and I just don't know what effect it would have on them.
