Rouane Itani

I’ve been working with a Haitian documentary filmmaker for about 6 months. It is a historical film and we’ve been compiling archival photos and content. One of the photo I have in my Final Cut system is behind the presidential Palace in Port-au-Prince. We were talking about how he would like to film reenactments there.

We were sitting looking at the material when he got the call about the earthquake in Haiti. He lost both his parents!
Needless to stay, the project has been on hold since.

My heart goes out to the people of Haiti. A beautiful country that I visited twice in 2006 as an election observer.
Haitians are resilient people and will rise up from the ashes to create a better country.

I’ve created a few short excerpts and put them online.
A rough assembly of the footage of the first trip is put together. Looking forward to adding footage from trip 2.
Transcription has been completed. General organization and basic logging started.

I started this blog right before the trip, thinking I was going to write a diary while in Beirut.
I got so engulfed in life there and didn’t blog.

Then I went back to the daily grind of DC and the blog went by the wayside.

There were so many thoughts, emotions, experiences during the 3 weeks in Lebanon. They were too overwhelming to capture in words.

Though everyone knows how small Lebanon is and that everyone knows everyone, I am still amazed at every coincidence and my connecting web of people.

I hired an assistant in Lebanon to follow up with the organizations I talked to and get additional still photos. She told me about an organization I didnot get a chance to visit, and then told me that one of their executives was in DC. I jumped on the occasion thinking this person may be here for a short time and that I had to meet her. I turns out she is an American who went to live for 4 years in Lebanon and helped start the organization and was now living in DC. We met twice, talked Lebanese politics and brainstormed about my film proposal. Of course, she knew most of the people I interviewed and many more in common. It seems the distance between Beirut and Washington is not that big.

Transcribed my interviews within one week of returning and was congratulating myself on how fast and accomplished that was.

Followed up with a researcher I hired and collected photos from organizations. I organized all the information I got from the trip.

Did more online research and learned so much more about the topic. Worked further on the outline and proposal draft.

While watching the local TV news, one of the women female candidates, a fresh young face in Beirut was on a talk show. Nayla Tueni is the daughter of journalist Gibran Tueni. The family started one of the major newspapers in the country 75 years ago. Her father won in the 2005 parliamentary elections, but was assassinated shortly after.

I filmed 2 talk shows she was on. The mood of elections is very focused on other urgent matters of fights between the 2 major political blocks. Wondering if I should have chosen a production time outside the elections.

I started contacting production freelancers hoping to line up an AD/PA. Visited a production company and starting getting in the gear of action. Filmed Broll from the car, billboards, conversations with family and friends recording their views on current politics.

I stumbled by chance upon the new offices of LADE that moved to a bigger fancier building close to where they used to be. Everyone I talk says good things about Ziad Baroud, the minister of interior who used to be secretary general of the organization.

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