A couple of weeks ago, Jo Higgs, a film maker from South Africa, generously donated her time and expertise to travel to Pietermaritzburg to visit the PMB Mental Health Society and capture some stunning footage of our partners and the people we support. Jo shared her stories of the time she spent with the PMB Mental Health Society. Over the next week we will share her story in three parts. Continue reading and follow this story to find her truly touching account of the people she met.
‘Our Story’, the video Jo was shooting for will be premiered at Climb Any Mountain’s TLC Gala Dinner and Auction on 25 October 2013. For tickets to this event, visit http://galadinner.climbanymountain.org/tickets/.
“Hi team!
We had a great shoot in PMB this week. Philippa (Director of the PMB Mental Health Society) and her team were unbelievably good to us and we so enjoyed meeting everyone at the centre. It was a real privilege.
Day 1: Monday
We spent the first part of Monday speaking to Philippa to better understand our context, also speaking to many of the clients involved with the workshop and then to the social workers – planning our time there and making final decisions on our two main characters. We decided in the end to go with Somiso and Cindy.
We then got to know the unbelievable personalities at the Buxton workshop, which we covered quite extensively. We captured eight short interviews and also took some wonderful photographs.
We asked a variety of questions to encourage our interviewees to show us some of themselves. This was more challenging and also more wonderful than I could have ever expected. All the rules for conducting documentary interviews went out the window with some interesting results! For example, it was difficult for most of our interviewees to answer a question in a full sentence, so I had to adjust our mic setup and record my own voice as I asked the questions. And what I thought would be a good question to lead from the last one hardly ever turned out to be! But what we saw were highly creative answers and unexpected perspectives and truly sincere feelings. What a privilege to have had that experience.”
Watch this space to continue reading about Jo’s incredible time with the PMB Mental Health Society.
