“What makes a Calvin student fly 36,000 miles and then spend 16 hours in a bus ride and then be in the sand holding boom mike?” asked media relations professor Daniel Garcia, who also supplied the answer to the question: “Vocation, love , filmmaking, a good story, a courageous story.” The story is of a young Peruvian woman, newly widowed, who—thwarting the tradition of her community—takes up fishing to support herself.
“It’s a story not really about a woman, but a gender who doesn’t have any other option in life than to follow the very basic default experience, Garcia said.
To tell the story, Garcia and the 11 students in his May interim class are spending three weeks in Peru, filming in a small coastal village. Their work on the production will become Pescadora, a movie (featuring actors from Lima). The class is also shooting a short documentary about the village. And they’re video-blogging about the whole experience. Candace Price, the sophomore student coordinating the blog, is excited that the class is making a film about an unfamiliar tale: “I actually feel it can be relatable to anyone. It’s not just an American experience. In the United States, especially, girls my age are interested in the unidentifiable right now—the experience that’s been hidden from us … I think that’s why we have so many films right now from people in Argentina, Egypt, East Africa, Ethiopia—because people want to experience the real stories of people in those countries—not the Hollywood perspective.”
