It might be easy to jump to conclusions about a documentary dealing with women overcoming economic struggles, but watching “From Zimbabwe to Santa Fe,” screening at the 2012 Santa Fe Film Festival, I was nailed to my chair. It was only after it was over that I realized that tears were running down my face, moved by the story of Matron and Gogo.
These two Zimbabwean women are basket makers, and they battle to survive, day after day, in a country immersed in absolute poverty, where currency has been replaced by barter. These women work hard to support their families and to help their communities, but their art and what they manage to harvest in the fields allow them to put food on their table—nothing more. This could change if they could travel to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to sell their baskets at the world’s largest folk art market, held one weekend a year.
The 18-month journey begins for them and for their communities, as they try to figure out who is the best person to travel and how to come up with the money for passports and the $400 they need to send in order to secure a booth at the market.
This film is about hope, about unity, but most of all, about courage—the kind of courage that women from a remote, almost forgotten land show when they are presented with the opportunity to earn money to provide a better life for their families and to pay for school for their children, even if it means having to travel to an unknown place, not knowing what they´ll have to face.
Four stars to director Cristina McCandless in exploring different angles of the drama. She provides us with an understanding of an array of situations: bureaucracy, for example, in the case when Matron requests a visa to travel to the United States and it’s denied, even when she presents a letter of invitation from the organizers of the market.
Another aspect of this documentary that was extremely interesting to me was to learn about the great work of the organizers of the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market in order to help and support artists from around the world. Until now this was unknown to me.
Filmmaker McCandless has left me feeling, myself, like the Zimbabwean women, learning about an unknown world…and I want to know more.
– – – – – – – – – –
“From Zimbabwe to Santa Fe” runs 75 minutes. It will be shown Friday December 7th @ 2:15 pmpm pm at the Center for the Contemporary Arts.
For more information and complete program and schedule, please visit the Santa Fe Film Festival website, here, or to purchase tickets, go to TicketsSantaFe.org.
