ÉCU-The European Independent Film Festival

What’s unusual about Malagasy Gospel? Directors Carlos
Esbert, Virginia Camino, Alvaro Lagos, and Graciela de Pablos give us
the details on their inspiring and recent ÉCU 2010 selected documentary
feature about a blind, orphaned children’s choir.

By Nick Forrester

Q: It seemed to me that
everyone making the film genuinely enjoyed spending time with these
unique kids, but what initially inspired you to make the film?

The starting point of the project was in fact an invitation by Bel Avenir NGO, the Malagasy association responsible for the Malagasy Gospel
musical project. So the first idea was to make a little documentary
about the Malagasy Gospel tour in Spain. Once we met the children of
the choir for the first time everything changed very quickly. We
discovered a group of wonderful and unique human beings. We met with
something magical, something you very rarely have the chance to meet in
this life: the orphaned blind children from the Malagasy Gospel.

Q: All of the children were
remarkably comfortable in front of the camera. Was it difficult for you
and the camera to slip into their everyday lives?

During the shooting in Spain,
everything was so new and different from their daily lives that they
used to forget the camera very quickly. That was an advantage for us,
we got to know each other for the first time during those first weeks
of the shooting. In Madagascar everything changed from Spain. We became
the strangers for everybody. But not for the Malagasy Gospel
children, we were their guests. That complicity was crucial to develop
a deeper relationship between us and the children that lead to us
experiencing the kind of intimate scenes the film offers.

Q: Most of the narrative is
told visually. Did you do this to give the film a more international
appeal and were you ever tempted to give a voiceover?

The reason why the film doesn’t include
any kind of voiceover is simple and fundamental. The children in this
film express everything through their voices and their faces, their way
of being with the others and their music shows us how important singing
becomes for those children. It shows a way of talking, a way of giving
affection, a way of breathing. Nothing else needs to be added. As you
mentioned at the beginning of this interview the pleasure of sharing a
few months of our lives with these children was the most important
feeling our cameras could express to the audience.

Filming in school: Behind the scenes of “Malagasy Gospel”. Directors Graciela de Pablos (left) amd Virginia Camino (right).

Q: In the first performance
scene the little girl gives a huge smile as the choir answer’s her
solo, and this seemed to me to encapsulate the group strength that
singing provides. Do you think that audiences that came to the live
performances were left with this impression?

For sure. I’ve never [seen] in my life
so many people crying and smiling at the same time while listening and
observing the magic of these unique children during the concerts.
Everybody used to think before the Malagasy Gospel concerts:
“Oh! those poor children, they have little at all in their miserable
life…” After the show everybody discovers something very strong. They
are not alone, they are not sad. They are poor and they have no money
at all, but they have the friendship of each other, they have their
music, at every day, at every hour. And, they are able to be happy in
their own way.

Q: Though the viewer is made
aware of the basic back story we aren’t given individual accounts of
the horrors that have occurred. When it comes to heightening awareness
for children’s rights do you think it is important to focus on the good
that has come such initiatives rather than the bad that went before?

Malagasy Gospel is not a film
about poverty, about African children crying and suffering of hunger.
This not a film trying to give the audience a bad feeling of how
everything is going on so badly in Africa. Malagasy Gospel is
a film about happiness and about hope. These children appear to have
nothing can carry out a happy lives and they can teach us some values
we are may be too quickly forgetting in “modern” countries: the
importance of always taking care of each other.

Behind the scenes, directors Carlos Esbert (right) & Alvaro Lagos (left).

Q: Tell us about your next project.

Next summer we’re going back to
Madagascar. A big music school has been built this year to take in all
orphaned blind children from Tulear, [a] southern city [in] Madagascar
where the Malagasy Gospel was created. We are now developing
and preparing a production that would permit us to share a whole year
in this new music school and see where the children will sleep, eat and
pass most of the time doing what it really makes them happy in this
life: music.