Listen Live
WERE AM Mobile App 2020

LISTEN LIVE. LIKE US ON FACEBOOK. FOLLOW US ON TWITTER

News Talk Cleveland Featured Video
CLOSE

 

 

 

Tiffany Laufer has never been to the Democratic Republic of Congo. For that matter, she hasn’t traveled anywhere in Africa. But a 2008 National Geographic cover story about the slaughter of seven endangered mountain gorillas in eastern Congo took her heart and her imagination there, and led to her first film as a writer and director. “The Acorn Penny,” her 14-minute feature, will be shown at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Friday, Aug. 13.

The movie is not about the gorillas, however. It’s about a young survivor of the brutal civil war in the Congo, a chaotic battle that has been called “Africa’s First World War” and has left millions dead. The National Geographic story linked the gorilla murders to the decade-long war, a complex conflict that involves a precious mineral used in electronics, the illegal harvest of trees in a national park to make charcoal, roving bands of sadistic rebels and a three-way battle between rival militias and the Congolese army.

The story shocked Laufer, who knew nothing of this war. She was hardly alone, however. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently wrote, from one of the overflowing camps of refugees who fled the widespread rape and killing, that “no humanitarian crisis generates so little attention per million corpses, or such a pathetic international response.”

Laufer, 36, who grew up and still lives in Cleveland Heights, couldn’t stop thinking and reading about the Congo.

“It was an eye-opening experience getting on the Internet and doing research,” she said. “I realized the Rwandan genocide never ended, it just went over into the Congo. You can’t even really fathom the atrocities that are happening there.”

Laufer’s research turned into something of an obsession, and that turned into the desire to use the skills she learned at the prestigious American Film Institute, where she studied cinematography after getting a degree in studio art from Georgetown University.

She started to write a feature-length film about a war photographer who goes to the Congo and witnesses the killing of the gorillas.

“But making a feature film, even an independent film, takes millions of dollars and a lot of time,” she said. So she decided to make a short feature, financing the $30,000 budget with “angle investors” and her own savings.

That kind of budget obviously didn’t allow for a trip to the Congo to shoot the film, so Laufer got creative. She wrote her script about a young Congolese girl’s fantasy of living a normal, safe life — in Cleveland. In her fantasy, she is led through the city by a handful of magical acorns.

With that as her story, Laufer was able to shoot entirely in the Cleveland area last summer. For scenes depicting the girl’s real life in a refugee camp, Laufer used footage supplied by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees as background plates, and shot using green-screen technology for the foreground.

Though news reports from the war in the Congo depict a nightmare of atrocities, Laufer was determined to make a film that would alert viewers to the war without using violence.

“I can barely even watch violent movies,” she said.

Read More

Story Compliments Of The Plain Dealer