with filmmaker Jane Gillooly
In Swaziland, the circle of life has been turned on its head. Grandmothers—or Gogos, as they are called in SiSwati and many southern African languages—watch their adult children die of AIDS and are forced to raise their many grandchildren on their own. Great documentaries have the power to personalize seemingly incomprehensible world issues, breaking barriers of distance and language to present the human condition across cultures. Few achieve that feat as well as Jane Gillooly's Today the Hawk Takes One Chick, which presents the stories of three African Gogos living in a society at the threshold of simultaneous collapse and reinvention, organizing into communities at an age when they expected that their adult children would be taking care of them. "Filmmaker Jane Gillooly focuses a still, clear lens on a tiny corner of Africa's AIDS crisis and in so doing illuminates the whole. The documentary is heartbreaking but in none of the obvious ways; rather than disease per se, the subject is the vast and wrenching social consequences of epidemic.… With a rare lucidity, Today the Hawk Takes One Chick catches the sound of the wind whistling through an entire people's graveyard and wonders about the long road back." (Boston Globe) More at janegillooly.com. Video projection. Cosponsored with the Institute for African Development, Global Health Program, Cornell Health International and the Ithaca City of Asylum.
2008, color, 1 hour 13 minutes, USA