58 minutes, Not Yet Rated
USA, 2004
English & Nepali with English
subtitles
DVD/Color
UPC Code 883629002811
|
Contacts: |
|
|
Claude von Roesgen Email: claude@jimisir.com Phone: (978) 405-2524 |
Ellen Gitelman American Graphiti Email: elleng@americangraphiti.com Phone: 617-426-6668 |
Produced, directed
& written by
|
Claude von Roesgen
|
|
Edited by |
Claude von Roesgen |
|
Narration by |
Don Westcott |
“A powerful film about a humble undertaking, I find myself
still thinking about it days after seeing it," said one viewer of Claude
von Roesgen’s documentary film, Jimi Sir: An American Peace Corps Volunteer
in Nepal.
In 1984, von
Roesgen traveled to the tiny hill town of Melung, Nepal to document his best
friend James Parks, the “Jimi Sir” of the movie’s title, during the final
months of his Peace Corps service as a high school math, science and English
teacher. The viewer gets to know the
welcoming and upbeat “Jimi” in an intimate way, allowing us to experience the
common themes of almost all human interactions around the world.
By the time von Roesgen
arrived in Melung, Jimi had well-established relationships with the village
people. Through Jimi’s eyes we experience the village’s culture, including the
farming life (everyone has an acre of land to farm rice and a few vegetables),
the caste system (the town is comprised of a spectrum of classes ranging from
high priests to what’s considered lowly carpenters and tailors), and festivals
and customs, such as the Hindu festival of Tihaar, a tribute to the animals.
An original
and fascinating portrayal of a Westerner’s experience engaging people in a
vastly different culture, the film also underscores
the challenges facing Nepal as its citizens struggle with overpopulation,
deforestation, and drinking water quality. Whether you’ve been to Nepal as a
tourist or as a Peace Corps volunteer, or you’re just interested in either
experience, the film transports you to an enchanting land that time has nearly
forgotten.
Jimi Sir: An American Peace Corps Volunteer in Nepal—page 3
The making
of “Jimi Sir”
On an
appointed day in September 1984, filmmaker Claude von Roesgen met up in
Katmandu, Nepal with his friend “Jimi”, a Peace Corps volunteer in the tiny
hill town of Melung, not a small miracle in a land where landslides can leave
people stranded for days. Equipped with 100 VHS-C videocassettes, 30 hours of
non-rechargeable lithium battery power, and the most portable consumer video
equipment available at that time, von Roesgen set out on an adventure that had
been almost two years in the making.
Melung is located in the rugged
terrain between the barren Tibetan plateau and the plains of India, only a
day’s walk south of the trail from Katmandu to the Mount Everest base camp. It is only 25 miles as the crow flies from Katmandu, yet it took two full days for
the two to get there—one day on a bus and
another walking through the foothills of the Himalayas.
Although
shot 20 years ago, today Melung is pretty much the same as it was in the Middle
Ages: a town without roads, vehicles,
electricity, plumbing, telephone or radio. Side by side, the majority Hindus and a small group of Buddhists
continue to farm rice and a few staple fruits and vegetables, as well as
practice their respective ancient rituals.
Because it is not on one of the
regular trekking trails, today Melung lacks the usual Internet
cafes teeming with Americans that have taken over Nepal.
For ten weeks, von Roesgen filmed Jimi’s daily life there
as a high school math, science, and English teacher living
in a primitively furnished room that is part of Melung's health clinic. He
also documented Jimi as he strived to complete the construction of a science
lab and a latrine before his two years of service as a volunteer ended.
After filming the emotional farewell party, in which
Jimi’s face and hair are dabbed with bright red pigment, von Roesgen abruptly
turns the scene to an icy day in Boston as Jimi reflects upon his experience.
Given the constraints—no electricity, plumbing or
roads—von Roesgen had to be very resourceful not only as a visitor, but also as
a filmmaker, doing such things as fixing a short in his Walkman Pro audio
recorder with a makeshift soldering iron cobbled together with a wire sharpened
on a stone and heated up by a kerosene cooking stone. Since he had only brought
30 hours worth of batteries that he couldn’t recharge or replace, he also had
to schedule his filming very carefully.
Von Roesgen edited down the lion’s share of the 30 hours
of video in the first six months after his return from Nepal, until his
finances ran out. He didn’t pick up work again on the film for 18 years in
2002. By then, video technology had
advanced so much that he had to modify his decades old equipment in order to
convert it to high quality video that was compatible with today's digital
technology.
His friend Jimi has changed, too. He is now a lead
economist at the World Bank and completely gray, but the story of Jimi’s
experience in the Peace Corps in Nepal remains timeless and universally
appealing.
Jimi Sir: An American Peace Corps Volunteer in Nepal—page 3
Claude’s career in filmmaking is not unlike a journey
through the Himalayas of Nepal—long and twisty with some breathtaking peaks and
a number of sidetracks. Jimi Sir: An
American Peace Corps Volunteer in Nepal represents his first feature length
documentary.
While an engineering student at MIT, Claude studied
with the legendary filmmaker Richard Leacock, one of the pioneers of the cinema
verité style of documentaries. After graduation, his first foray into the field
was as a soundman for the PBS documentary "The Information Society".
He simultaneously worked as a solar design consultant.
His first summer after graduation, he and his best friend
from college, the film’s titular Jimi (James Parks), quit their jobs and
embarked upon their first of many adventures together: walking the Appalachian
Trail from Boston to Waynesboro, Virginia in 80 days. The following summer they
quit their jobs again and bicycled from Boston to San Francisco.
After yet another turn at a conventional job, this time as
a technical journalist, Claude returned to film and video. Before embarking on
his biggest adventure yet with his friend James—making a film about James’s
experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal—he shot and edited a short film
about the intercultural experiences of two Boy Scout Troops, one from the U.S.
and one from Spain, who together participated in Pamplona's annual running of
the bulls and a climb up Mount Perdido in the Spanish Pyrenées.
When he returned to Boston from Nepal at the end of 1984,
Claude focused on editing the 30 hours of footage down to a one-hour program.
At the end of six months he had learned how to edit, but he was also broke. He
was forced to stop work on the film and began writing scripts for industrial
videos to earn money. Soon he and a college roommate started a video production
company called Visual Thinking, but he eventually closed the
company to become head of the video production department at a Fortune 500
company.
In 1993, Claude became fascinated by what was then a
relatively new phenomenon—the Internet. Again, he switched courses to became
one of the Internet’s first Web Masters, abandoning video production
altogether.
In 2002, while working as a software engineer in the
Boston area, he renewed his interest in film yet again, picking up where he
left off on his documentary about his friend James. Video formatting had
changed so much since 1985 that he had to laboriously transfer the 30 hours of
footage to another medium. After nearly two years, he finally finished the film
he had always dreamed of making and is looking forward to making his next one.