The 2013 season of the Woods Hole Film Festival Winter Film Series Dinner & a Movie continues on Saturday, January 19th. The series kicks off with a screening of the award-winning documentary "Bay of all Saints".
The series takes place in the Waterfront Dining Room at the Cap’n Kidd Restaurant, 77 Water Street, Woods Hole.
Dinner & a Movie takes place weekends through April 2013. Dinner & a Movie is a great way to enjoy a night out with friends and family.
For $25 per person, select from a preset menu of sumptuous food prepared specially for the evening. The price includes entree and movie, but does not include beverage, dessert, tax or tip.
Dinner is served from 5:30 PM and the screening begins at approximately 7:30 PM. Reservations are required. Call (508) 548-8563 to reserve your table.
For more information about Dinner & a Movie, contact the Woods Hole Film Festival at (508) 495-3456 or info@woodsholefilmfestival.org. The schedule is posted online at www.woodsholefilmfestival.org.
SynopsisIn Bahia, Brazil, generations of impoverished families live in palafitas, a vast network of shacks built on stilts above a rising tide of garbage over the ocean bay. When the government threatens to reclaim the bay in the name of ecological restoration, hundreds of families are about to lose their homes.
Filmed over 6 years, BAY OF ALL SAINTS is a lyrical portrait of three single-mothers living in the water slums during this crisis. Geni, AKA ‘Miss Mayor’, a pizza parlor manager, rapidly becomes a community organizer; Jesus, a laundry-washer, starts to look beyond her dreams of a Prince Charming who never comes; Dona Maria, a trash-picker, once freed from domestic servitude, ventures outside the palafitas as she raises her 16 children and grandchildren on the ocean bay.Their individual stories of poverty unfold through visits from Norato, their big-hearted refrigerator repairman, born and raised in the palafitas. He bears witness, as each family is promised a new home in governmental housing, without knowing when, or if this promise will ever be kept.
BAY OF ALL SAINTS offers a glimpse at the complexities of urban poverty; the sacrifices these women make for their children’s survival and the demands of life on the Bay. Ultimately, the State’s urban development project—through its tumult and blunders—compels these women to rise up and fight for their future.
Filmmaker Annie Eastman first came to the water slums of Bahia, Brazil in 1999 to work with a grassroots arts and education organization called GRUCON. She worked and resided in the neighborhood for 18-months, learned Portuguese and co-directed a short documentary to support GRUCON’s work. She was deeply struck by the eerie and tragic views of extreme poverty and nearly doubled over by the stench of decaying sewage rising through the air. As she walked along the bridges of the palafitas for the first time, she was struck again—no longer by the horror she saw, but by the grace and femininity she found within the shacks.She soon realized that the majority of the homes belong to single mothers. Like so many places in the world, the most vulnerable populations are pushed into the worst living conditions. When she learned of the government’s impending plans to demolish these homes, she picked up a camera and set out to document the impact this urban-renewal project would ultimately have on the impoverished people it displaced.
To see this project through, she made 12 additional trips to Brazil over the next 6 years. On production trips she slept in the palafitas, in the homes of the film’s characters, at first to spare hotel costs, and then because the people there became like family.
It was through the experience of working and living for 18-months in the palafitas that Eastman first explored the medium of film. With Norato, the neighborhood refrigerator repairman by her side, she faced her fears of walking around with an expensive camera in one of the most notoriously dangerous parts of the city. She began learning some of the first lessons of observational filmmaking: there’s no such thing as a fly on-the-wall, but patience is often rewarded. She tasted the absolute thrill – and frustration – of not knowing how situations would unfold, or how they would ultimately be edited into the film. And, she learned that sometimes, good documentary filmmaking is a matter of keeping the story options open, the camera steady and focus sharp.
