Volunteer trip produces unexpected documentary film

By Rick Peterson

Lawrence Today magazine, Summer 2007



Raad Fadaak ’08 (right) and Madison Tift ’08 (left) left campus as volunteers. They came back as filmmakers, potentially award-winning filmmakers.

During their 2006 Spring Break, Fadaak and Tift embarked on a seven-day stint as disaster relief volunteers to hurricane-ravished Louisiana. They were among 40 Lawrence students who took an 18-hour, 1,100-mile bus ride from Appleton to St. Bernard Parish (Lawrence Today, Summer 2006) to aid in hurricane recovery.

More than a digital diary
Toting a digital video camera to record their experiences, what was initially intended to be merely a video “memoir” of the trip turned into a documentary film.

After arriving in Louisiana and seeing the extent of the devastation that remained seven months after the storm, the two roommates — whose prior collective filming experience didn’t amount to so much as shooting a YouTube video — ended up turning the camera on several of the volunteers and local residents they encountered at the Made with Love Cafe & Grill, a makeshift kitchen and dining hall housed in two large canvas-covered geodesic domes in Arabi, Louisiana.

Eleven months later, Made with Love: A Story of Emergency Communities, a 51-minute documentary, had its world premiere at a February screening in the Wriston Art Center auditorium.

“We signed up for the trip because we wanted to be part of the recovery effort,” says Tift, from Boca Raton, Florida, “but when we got down there and saw the level of devastation that still remained and began talking to some of the residents, we decided that other people needed to see this. It wasn’t enough for it to just be something personal for the two of us.”

While the memoir-to-documentary evolved over the course of the week they spent in Louisiana, a 90-minute interview conducted with three firemen from St. Bernard Parish provided an epiphany for Fadaak.

“I felt we had captured something we weren’t seeing other places,” Fadaak says. “They told us about heroism and great rescue stories. But they also were really upset at the government for its failure to prepare for and respond to the disaster.

“What struck me was the fact these firemen straddled the different identities of the area. They were government employees, rescuers, and local residents all at once. All those different perspectives combined to give us a unique view of the situation and its effects.”

A broader audience
The film’s initial audience was largely Lawrence classmates, but the cinematic handiwork of the fledgling filmmakers is guaranteed a much broader audience. Made With Love was accepted into and shown at the 2007 Wisconsin Film Festival, which ran April 12-15 in Madison. Even more impressively, it will be screened at the international Swansea Bay Film Festival in Wales (May 29-June 10) as a nominee in the festival’s “Best Documentary” category.

Founded in 2006, the Swansea Bay Film Festival has quickly become the UK’s biggest event of its kind. As of late March, the festival had attracted 1,257 submissions from around the world, of which only 258 had been accepted for public screening.

“It was a pretty amazing moment when we found out it was accepted and designated ‘an official selection,’” says Tift, who, as Lawrence Today went to press, was still waiting to hear from a dozen or so other festivals to which he also submitted the film.

People telling their stories
Made with Love is a moving story of “people helping people.” The film blends harrowing images of devastation, poignant stories of loss and frustration, and uplifting messages of hope that inspire and reaffirm the indomitable human spirit. In addition to talking to several fellow Lawrence students both before they left on the trip and after they returned, Fadaak and Tift interviewed area residents — a Mr. John Wilkes Booth among them — and several long-term volunteers from the organization Emergency Communities.

“The camera gave us an excuse to talk to these people about their experiences,” says Fadaak, from West Linn, Oregon.

“People were extremely anxious to tell their stories about the storm and what they thought of the government response,” adds Tift, who is hoping to pursue a self-designed major in film studies at Lawrence.

“It was a very intense experience, interviewing people whose lives were changed so drastically.”

Making the movie
After returning to campus, the pair hunkered down to review the ten hours of raw footage they had shot.

“That’s when the impact of what we had filmed really hit us,” says Fadaak, whose proposed self-designed major in Islam in the Middle East is awaiting approval. “We realized we had captured some very powerful stuff.”

Collecting powerful footage, it turned out, was the easy part. Physically assembling it into the cohesive story they hoped to tell was cumbersome. With virtually no experience using computer editing software, the task proved daunting and the neophyte documentarians quickly concluded it was going to take years to finish it.

A godsend arrived in the form of Gretta Wing Miller, an aunt of Alison Miller ’08, one of the Lawrence student volunteers who participated in the trip. A professional film editor in Madison, Miller offered to meet with Tift and Fadaak to provide some pointers.

“When I saw the interviews they had captured, they were just so moving,” said Miller. “I wouldn’t let them leave. I said, ‘You have to let me have this and let me edit it.’”

Working from a script and storyboards Tift and Fadaak wrote, Miller handled all of the film’s editing and post-production work — completely gratis — a process that began last September and ended in early February.

“We were forced into being producers, which was a completely new role for us,” Fadaak said. “We had to organize ideas into content and content into ideas. Gretta was able to capture our vision and turn it into something special. We’re eternally indebted to her for her services.”

Tift admits to a bit of a lump-in-the-throat moment when he watched the finished product for the first time.

“I don’t think we could ever have imagined ending up with something that looks so good. If someone had told me a year ago I’d be submitting a documentary to international film festivals, I would have laughed out loud. It’s all happened very quickly"