Documentary filmmakers often end a shoot on a high. Nadine Pequeneza is instead shell shocked.
Sitting in a busy Toronto coffee shop, she looks out at the midday traffic, her hand lightly touching her sunburned temple. She's just back from filming disaster-relief efforts in Haiti, often capturing some of worst conditions in the congested, hilly residential areas around Port-au-Prince where news crews hadn't ventured and homeless people were sleeping by the side of the road.
Her voice is unwavering, almost monotone as she describes what she and the crew saw.
"There were still bodies all over Port-au-Prince. [One]body we drove by three times on the last day we were there," she says. That was in mid-February, already a month after the earthquake. The relief effort which she went to film is now being left behind as the news cycle turns its attention elsewhere, but the damage to Haitian society, not to mention its crumpled buildings, becomes more difficult to fix. She plans to return to Haiti in July. That month is a crucial target for the recovery efforts, because hurricane season starts in August.
Pequeneza had initially approached the Red Cross' Geneva headquarters and Ottawa office two years ago with the idea of filming disaster response. She secured an arrangement in which the filmmakers could get information from the organization when it would be sending out a disaster assessment team immediately following a major disaster hit.
That at least was the plan. But when the earthquake struck on Jan. 12, there was no time for confirmation. "After watching the news for about half an hour, we were, like, 'I think we should book some tickets.' We figured that even though they don't know whether they are going yet, they'll know in the next couple of hours. And these tickets are going to book up, because all CNN was talking about was how they were going to get their people in there," Pequeneza said.
She and her film crew from Toronto left the next day for Santo Domingo in the neighbouring Dominican Republic. The crew crossed into Haiti by road, seven hours with a hired car and driver, which was pure luck, Pequeneza said. They hired one of the last cars available. A second crew departed Canada two days after Pequeneza, bringing such crucial equipment as a generator and emergency meal packets.
The director is now in Toronto editing hundreds of hours of footage for Inside Disaster, a look at how the Red Cross directs aid in conditions of total calamity. Pequeneza's film crew had insider access to the Red Cross and other aid groups on the ground, and she recognizes the apparent conflict of being a journalist and partly embedded with these organizations. But the film isn't funded by the Red Cross or any other aid group.
The images of Haiti are stuck vivid inside her head. Outside one of the vaccination camps, there was a woman who had lost her leg and died on the side of the road. She was still there weeks after the disaster, her corpse lying "in the sun, bloated, oozing."
But Pequeneza, who was a news producer for CBC and CTV before becoming a filmmaker a decade ago, says she is less interested in recording the devastation and more focused on the relief effort and the kaleidoscope of survivors and their stories amid the wreckage. She and her crew, including a producer who has been generating web-based content, sought to capture the unseen sides of the crisis.
"All the news media portrays is the fighting and people jumping over each other to get food. But I saw a tremendous amount of sharing," Pequeneza says. "Communities share everything. The women would go out during the day, and the men too, and they'd have some people designated to look after the children in the camp [as]they all went out looking for food or whatever they could bring back, and then they'd share it."
One woman they interviewed, Madame Magalee Langlee, had been relatively well off and had operated an electronics store in her house. She lost four of her five children in the earthquake. The kids were inside watching TV when her home collapsed. Her husband survived, but is so shell-shocked that he can do little. Her sole surviving child, an 11-year-old son, now may have malaria, the woman fears. Langlee hadn't yet received help from the Red Cross when Pequeneza filmed her in the weeks following the earthquake.
"She has just sort of left everything up to God now," Pequeneza says. "Every time you ask her, it's 'God wants it, if that's the way it's supposed to be.' It's hard to imagine how helpless you feel in a situation like that. But what I'm seeing from her is a complete feeling of helplessness."
Some of this footage of the disaster can already be seen on the doc's website, www.insidedisaster.com. The final documentary is scheduled to be ready for the film festival season in September.