Noro's Prayer

Through a party I hosted to inaugurate an exhibition of photos, drawings, video and text of my journey, at my flat in Antananarivo, I made a good connection with the esteemed Roland Pritchett, representing SIT Study Abroad in Madagascar.

Roland is one of those people innately inquisitive about local language and culture, a good thing too since he was responsible for encouraging visiting students to take up the same curiosity. Having spent some years in Madagascar working with local communities to place students with host families, Roland was a perfect contact to help me make friends with local communities. Not only did Roland invite his visiting students to see my exhibition, for which they graciously applauded, but more importantly put me in touch with his Malagasy contacts on the ground.

Soon I was on the road with my newly acquired lightweight Lifan motocross style bike, on the way to meeting Emmanual "Manou" Razafimahatratra, one of Roland's contacts in Tsiroanomandidy.

I have to say, whilst I had been sad to leave my Triumph in South Africa, I really enjoyed the new-found freedom of a light bike that allowed me to travel on almost any terrain and which was absolutely perfect for taking the tiny dirt roads around the villages of Ambalanirana.

Manou introduced me to my host family; mother Alice-Pauline, father Desiré and daughter Voahangy, who would become my close companions during the coming weeks.

Here was my base in Belavenona, a typical Malagasy small country farming village, in view of the rolling mount Nkankaolo.

First thing was first, I had to get to know the children and make friends. With a roll in my camera I set out to take some photos around the village, shortly followed by a line of eager acolytes. It wasn't long before a barrage of demands for photos came pouring in behind me.

Another way I like to keep children entertained is by sitting down and letting them watch me do a sketch with pen and watercolour.

Once children were befriended they began to demonstrate some of the games they played, including Tantara Vato.

On this occasion I ran a little test to see how receptive the girls would be to being recorded. Afterwards I let the girls listen to their audio recordings.

They also loved listening to a recording of the song "Mamiprapiratra" that I had captured on a visit to Andringitra national park whilst listening to the load bearers, Nando, Fiday and friends' musical interludes at camp. The song was a hit with the girls as they sang along with it making it an obvious musical choice for me to include in this production.

Having made contact I returned to Antananarivo to develop photos and prepare for my next visit when I intended to return to record more girls' Tantara Vato stories.

On my return Alice-Pauline made me a bluescreen cloth,

that would be used to hang as a backdrop at each village I recorded in.

I did get many stories infront of the bluescreen,

but I discovered that the video alpha mating I had wanted to do with the bluescreen in post-production didn't work very well. I decided to take a different approach and made a blackscreen instead.

I really enjoyed the journey between city and village, so I didn't mind the to and fro and besides I felt I was making good progress.

This time I recorded yet more stories infront of the blackscreen, reaching a total of 29 girls' Tantara Vato stories.

I took those Tantara Vato stories back to Antananarivo and had them translated from Malagasy into English by Candy Cornelia.

One particular story by Henintsoa Manankery stood out from all the rest. It contained so much intrigue and many plot twists, that it was far and above the most interesting story.

I turned the text into a screenplay and had the text translated back into Malagasy, so that Henintsoa and other locals I hoped to rope in to be actors, would be able to read the script. I also knocked up some of my tiny storyboards for personal use.

On my return to Belavenonoa, I was greeted with the usual enthusiasm of the children and their families. I too was very excited to find Henintsoa, to see how she would react to the proposition of making a video about her story. When confronted she meekly nodded her head as any bewildered farm girl might be if a foreigner turned up with a screenplay of her story and ask to make it into a video.

Once people understood what needed to be done we began the process of casting all the characters in the story. Manou and Irene Andrianifidy became indispensable at this point, reading the script and asking around for suitable characters. In the end though we seemed to find most of cast on our doorstep. Henintsoa would play the main role of Noro, her sister would play the older version of Noro and my host family became principal characters too.

We shot all the scenes in 2 days.

It was a sad goodbye on this last visit, because I knew I didn't have enough time to edit the material before I left Madagascar, so once again I wouldn't be able to see the reaction of all the participants when they saw the final production.