In the Carpathian Home for Disabled Children

LUND--Jennifer Lawrence, a nurse from Ohio whom I met on the SARA trip to Ukraine last summer, just sent me several CDs of her photos from the trip. This is one she took of me at work while visiting a home for mentally disabled children in the Carpathian mountains. The other is, more or less (there are three similar frames) the photo I was taking when she took this.

The Children Of The Mangroves Short Film

Current Projects

LUND--Last year I was hired by Film i Skåne/Cine Skåne a Swedish organization whose mission it is to promote independent cinema. The group organizes film festivals and contests, provides some funding for projects and works with area cinemas to show films that might otherwise have trouble getting shown. They hired me to make a series of short films for their website on seven area independent theatres. The films can be seen at Film i Skåne. It was a fascinating and fun project. Over the space of a few months I went to each theatre with Film i Skåne's Carolina Falk and we interviewed the owners and directors of each cinema, which varied from a small space in a museum of Swedish cinema in Kristianstad, located in what was Sweden's first film studio, to a large theatre in a modern museum, to theatres run by private individuals who simply love movies. During the project I met students, film directors, filmmakers who had just begun and ones who had been working for years and many, many interesting folks who simply love the magic of the silver screen.

I also recently re-edited a short version of The Children of the Mangroves with a lot of help from my American friend Matt Kuchta whose ideas made it, in my opinion anyway, a much better film (you can watch it in the above post). I re-edited it for the Pixel film contest but, unfortunately, they were unable to use it as it was shot on the American NTSC standard and I was unable to convert it to the European PAL in time since I got the submission in right on deadline. Still, I am quite happy with the re-edit and hope in the near future to return to El Salvador to take more footage of the currileros.

I am now deep in the editing process of the SARA Ukraine footage. I am anticipating a series of linked short films documenting the different medical and social programs SARA is involved with in Transcarpathia--from the orthopedic surgery and dentistry work to the mental hospital and home for disabled children up in the mountains to the Roma camp where that population is isolated from the general life of the city.

From Editing El Salvador

New Monkeys of the Day by Blair

Monkey of the Day

Another monkey from Tito's collection of stuffed admirers... Lena Philipson photo.

Children Of the Mangroves Redux

--Archive Photos--


A Salvadoran boy in El Espino, 2006



A Roma girl in Ukraine, 2008

LUND--I am (I hope) declaring "News From El Salvador: The Children of the Mangroves" finished, done, complete--at least in its present form. There were always some parts I wanted to tighten, a music track to add, a short interview to add and one or two or three parts of different interviews to cut. That is all done, finally, and if it isn't perfect then it will remain imperfect until I go back and spend a month in El Espino getting the footage the film deserves for a second incarnation. But this incarnation is done and better still, it is accompanied by a 20 minute short version that concentrates solely on the currileros, the clam-digging children of the mangroves. The short omits a lot of the background interviews and footage on the state of El Salvador today and though most of the footage it contains is present in the long version they are really different films. But both, along with a slide show, are contained on the DVD.

It is good to get that finished. I want to go back and will just as soon as I can find the funding to do so. But in the meantime I have been putting new galleries up on my website www.andrewtonnphoto.com so go and check out Faces of Transcarpathia and one of a Roma settlement outside of Barackzas, Transcarpathia. Both were taken this summer while I was in Ukraine with SARA. If the unrelenting black and white social documentary gets to you then check out Swedish Summertime in Skåne for a colorful look at the lighter side of life. Now it is time to begin editing the Ukraine footage in earnest.