LIGHTS, CAMERA, LOCATION!

In the tiny, impoverished village of Kuntaur, an effort to bring global education to Gambian communities through films shown on a makeshift screen under a starlit African sky.

- Ramdas Iyer

UNLIKE FILM festivals in Hollywood, there are no red carpets, celebrities or blockbusters, just pitch darkness and the surprising elements of lights, action and children. And it gets even darker on new moon days along the silently-flowing Gambia River near Kuntaur.

Here, deep inside Gambia and 280km from the river’s mouth in the Atlantic Ocean, the Kuntaur Film Festival was initiated by Ithaka Films, a New York-based visual language arts foundation. Since 2012, Constantine Venetopoulos, founder and director of Ithaka Films, has been staging movies for children and adults of this remote town in Gambia, which is mostly off the power grid.

His mission is to bring global education to Gambian communities through film.

On my part, with my camera, I captured the moments and partook in bringing the light of film into the lives of the children in the village of Kuntaur.

On an adventure voyage along the Gambia River to observe the cultural and natural landscape of a land ravaged by slavery, I could not escape the country’s amazing but sad history.

Gambia was a part of the powerful Mali Empire in the 13th century, its interiors mostly populated by the Mandinka, who moved east from the Niger River in Mali to the Gambia River in search of better agricultural land. However, the Mandinka were the most affected by the slave raids of European colonizers.

Between the 16th and 19th centuries, many Muslim and non- Muslim Mandinka people, along with numerous other African ethnic groups, were captured, enslaved, and shipped to the Americas.

These slave raids occurred all along the route we took on our voyage.