turtle diaries

are we too broad in our approach? too risky to listen to the voices of an entire town we will hardly know? tal vez. but people need to see the community as a whole and feel life here. so we pass feelings with the relentlessness of naive revolutionaries. how can we know any better? our goal: to profile and photograph as many people as we can. we will see these "characters" cross paths during the arribada. and then... we follow a turtle egg into the markets of san jose, to the point of purchase. and then we are back in ostional, everything is empty again. kids are playing soccer. streets quiet. and the solace of families sitting on empty porches. there are so many different roles and opinions in this town it is fascinating to fully realize how complicated things are here. they say that life is simple but i think it is far from that to be completely honest with you.

i think, or I feel at least, that a documentary is going well when all of your subjects question your intentions or at some point ask if you can turn off the cameras, despite the temporal frustration of wanting them to say things for the message of the film. I feel confident about the effects this film can have on the government of costa rica but nervous at the same time of the condemnation that might follow. history can absolve me with this impermeable memory (film), but I will still be saddened if I don't feel a part of this place some day. in team huddles during soccer games they tell me that in spite my "san jose colored skin" i am still a part of ostional. is that not more important in life?

meanwhile, we all return after long days of heartfelt discussions and moments of natural cinema to find ourselves in more in-depth coversations about the possible hypocrisy of viewership, and the multitude of directions that this film can take. if motorcycle diaries is how it really felt to be this wanderer for change, i can't help but to relate to the experience of such vagabonds in a film. we feel, and what we have captured only confirms this belief, that the course of things in ostional are slowly changing...or maybe it is just us.