Check out this behind the scenes video of a day in the shoot of "Yori Yori Babes", a Nollywood Nigerian movie being filmed in the United States.
"African film is the second largest (film) industry in the world. Can you imagine that?" -- Bella Nickole, actress in Yori Yori Babes.
"We have Nollywood USA now, which is when they come over here and they tell our stories, because our lifestyle here is different than the lifestyle of the typical Nigerian living in Nigeria"-- Estella Ogbonna, on set fashion designer.
"Somehow we try to chain it, to show people who are in this diaspora, and people who are on a journey from this place to another country. That is the whole thing." -- Sam Onwuka, one of the producers.
Watch this video to find out more about an artist who paints inner city landmarks in the U street corridor of the U.S. capital.
"I am Isabelle Spicer. I come from France and I started to paint very late, only five years ago, when I was in Moscow. It was like seeing the light for the first time."
"I live in downtown Washington, D.C., it's a neighborhood which is at the border between three communities, the African-American community, the white community and the Latino community."
"I see the city and this neighborhood with fresh eyes but on the other hand I'm very well integrated here."
“My dream is that one day African artists would be able to live from their music -- just like American people are doing right now -- and kind of create a new paradigm. I would like people to say there is an African dream too.” – Micky Badinga, beatmaker and MBA student in the southeastern state of Virginia.
Beatmaker Micky Badinga produces hip-hop music with samples, beats, singing, rapping, keyboards, and a computer.
Badinga started making music to fit his dance style as a teenager. His strongest musical influences have been his Gabonese heritage and the time he spent as a youth in France, where multi-cultural music reigns on airwaves. Now, while studying for his Master’s degree in Business Administration – an MBA -- he dreams of becoming an African Puff Daddy or Dr. Dre, two African-American rappers who went on to very lucrative and successful careers as music producers.
He believes his artistic talents, background and academic studies will help him succeed at the business of music in Africa.
Badinga says musicians trying to make a living from their music in Africa suffer badly from copyright violations. And only a small percentage can earn real money as musicians because there are so few avenues available to help them turn their talents into income -- mainly concert tours, and recording contracts they sign outside the continent.
After he graduates, Badinga hopes to go back to Africa to open his own recording studio. Eventually, he’d like to start his own recording company label to help African artists earn a better living from their music.
Until then, Badinga says, he’ll be working on his dream in the United States, making sure he succeeds in getting his MBA degree first, and learning what he can of the ins and outs of the fast-changing recording industry.
"To be free is not easy. To be free is hard. And always, you feel pain in your heart, but always there is happiness too." -- Salvadoran artist Danilo Rivera
Danilo Rivera gives the same instruction to all the students at his dance class in Washington, D.C: “Be free!”
He tells them that without a sense of liberation, their movements will never amount to art.
As a child in El Salvador, Rivera survived a civil war. Today, he is a professional dancer and painter.
In his dance, he uses fluid movements of his large, strong hands to express himself. He likes to paint angels with wings and muscular bodies.
Before leaving El Salvador, he accomplished one of his dreams: to paint the bodies of dancers, and then have them perform his dance on the streets. He said he cried when he saw his art so completely in motion.
Rivera says he hopes to move to Europe one day, to continue pushing at artistic and personal boundaries.
"Heritage tells you who you are, from the cradle to the grave. It tells you who you were before you came to the earth. It tells you where you're going when you leave here. It's a never-ending circle of life and you feel able to deal with a lot of the things that this world puts on you." Tim Moore, American Indian from the Seminole Tribe.
Thanksgiving is a holiday observed in the United States on the fourth Thursday of every November. It’s an occasion when Americans give thanks for their blessings of food, family, or whatever matters the most, whatever the circumstances.
The tradition, as the story that is taught in American schools goes, has its roots in the experience of a small group of European colonizers.
These colonizers survived their first difficult winter in a "New England" settlement (parts of the U.S. northeast still use this name) -- short of food and supplies -- largely because of the generous assistance of the local Wampanoag Indian tribe. Their first Thanksgiving dinner was a simple feast of wild fowl and greens and tubers, and offerings of thanks to God and to their Indian friends.
Fifty years later, the Wampanoags and the Plimoth Colony settlers would be at war with each other over land rights and other issues. Many American Indians today believe they lost a great deal when European colonizers arrived in the so-called “New World” – where many Indian tribes had already lived for tens of thousands of years. As those settlers began exploring, trading, cultivating and eventually building towns and cities across North America, the indigenous people were forced to abandon their ancestral lands.
But many of the direct descendants of those American Indian tribes – those that survived war, eviction and disease – still honor their lineage by keeping tribal customs and philosophies intact.
Tim Moore, who earns his paycheck as a government worker during the week, joins other American Indians each weekend to proudly showcase traditional dancing and crafts.
A Vietnam War veteran, Moore says he is grateful that in his Native American community, former soldiers are never forgotten or frowned upon, even if there is disagreement over whether the war in which they fought was just or unjust.
In this slideshow, Moore shares some of the wisdom he has gained in the course of a unique life lived in two parallel cultures.
"We have a strong appreciation for history. Everybody, including myself, is very passionate about American history. The civil war, I think, has a special interest for a lot of Americans because, the brother against brother, Americans killing Americans, is a concept that's intriguing." -- Participant at the reenactment of the Battle of Cedar Creek in Middletown, Virginia.
November 11th is Veterans Day in the United States, and the date is observed as Armistice Day and Remembrance Day in many other parts of the world.
Originally, it commemorated the end of fighting in World War One. Hostilities between the Allied nations and Germany officially ceased at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918. But today the observance honors all those who have served as soldiers in all wars. In the United States, that includes participants in the American Civil War.
An estimated three million Americans took up arms during the war between northern and southern states that raged from 1861 to 1865. The conflict ended with the Union victory over southern secessionists, the end of slavery, and the strengthening of the national government.
The Civil War is long over, but some of the issues that prompted the southern states to leave the Union remain unresolved. Many Americans still disagree over how much power the federal government should have, and how it should be distributed between Washington and the states.
The passion endures for this defining period in American history, and on many weekends, re-enactors can be found retracing battlefield maneuvers on the anniversary days of major encounters, dressed in civil-war-era clothes, riding horses, sleeping in tents, and firing vintage rifles and cannon (without the cannonballs) at each other. In this video, we meet some of the participants in a reenactment of the 1864 Battle of Cedar Creek, in which the Confederate Army surprised the Federal Army with a dawn attack, but then lost ground when Union troops retaliated.
What’s different on this day, of course, is that all the men, women and children who’ve come to replay this moment in American history know that they’ll be heading back to their homes, schools, jobs and other occupations after the last shots are fired.
"We need a societal shift in thinking and feeling. We need people to care about others. We have to turn people around. And I'm hopeful that my story will do it, because look at me. I don't have a job right now, other than I teach part-time art, but I'm out there. I'm working on it." Regina Holliday, health care reform activist and widow.
Regina Holliday, a 37-year-old widow, part-time art teacher and mother of two, has become a media darling in recent weeks, written about, photographed and filmed by countless journalists. The reason is her story, energy and a colorful mural she is working on in Washington, D.C., at the back of a gas station, across from a pharmacy, not too far from an independent bookstore. In paint on the six-meter high wall, she is recounting her husband's death within the U.S. medical system. He died June 17, 2009, the same day the U.S. Senate started debating health care reform.
Her husband was sent home to die of kidney cancer after doctors refused to try more tests or chemotherapy. For years, he didn't have health insurance, so he didn't take the tests that might have given him an early detection of what was causing his bloody urine and night sweats.
Holliday’s mural has a doctor standing in waste, which symbolizes inefficiency in helping sick people. Another doctor seems annoyed, moving away from his patient, talking aggressively on his cell phone. A nurse types into a computer, but the screen is dark, representing a "loop of information" going nowhere. Data is not transfered from one health center to another. In this artistic rendition, health care is not something that is for patients, it seems to be a money-making, cold monster -- a place where information is not used to help the sick get better, but rather it is compartmentalized to keep costs at high levels and avoid any lawsuits.
Holliday has painted quotes to inspire and engage from Thomas Jefferson to Harry Potter, saying in ways old and new there is a difference between what is right and what is easy.
A girl dressed in the American stars and stripes flag has her legs covered with welts, and a switch to whip her lying at her feet. Holliday says she represents an abuse victim, who thinks she doesn't want change, because she has been conditioned to be afraid.
Holliday was abused for 17 years growing up in her home. Her husband was a victim of poor health, and a society that leaves some of its sick behind. But now she says she is fighting back, with her ladder, paints and brushes.
She believes a government-run health insurance plan can help people like her who don't have a full-time job and benefits. She believes in the long-run it could become better for patients and more efficient than what is currently in place. Her views, of course, are hotly contested by some engaged in the current debate, in which there are many ideas, and many fears of rising costs, less incentive for market-driven innovation and more bureaucracy.
This television report by Carol Pearson shows how one company, grocery giant Safeway, allows employees who work on being healthier to pay less for their private insurance plan.
"In the black family, there is a different tempo to the conversation. In the white family, there is a different distance and fragility to touching and contact." -- Playwright Tom Minter
The press release for the play, "Past is Present, Imperfect," offers another quote by Minter: "I wonder. Now that we have a black president, can we tick the box of race and leave it behind as an issue? If not, how do we continue the opportunity of conversation?"
In an effort to answer these questions, Minter wrote a play about a multi-racial family. But to push the experiment farther, he decided to have two separate casts with different racial mixes perform the same play before the same audience, and to compare the performances and the reactions to them.
I asked the directors of the two casts if the era of post-racial theater was upon us. One of them said she didn't think so, while the other didn't like the question, and said race never had anything to do with theater. After the audience watched, there were nervous giggles, as well as carefully chosen words to describe the differences they perceived.
Judge for yourselves.
One of my earlier reports this year looked into how a diverse neighborhood in Washington D.C., still marred by race riots of the past, embraced the swearing-in of a multi-racial president.
As a multi-media reporter for VOA News, Nico lets people tell American stories unscripted. Write me on ncolomb (at) voanews (dot) com. Thanks for watching!
