This video is not available on this platform.
1939 days ago,
The following was posted in the blog of award-winning filmmaker, Jamie Doran, back in July 2007 following his first shoot in Ethiopia. He had first been invited to the country by Tim Brosnan, an Irishman who had decided to devote his time and fortune made in banking to the cause of eradicating poverty in Africa. But Tim was no ordinary do-gooder, simply donating funds to the usual aid charities. Instead, he had made it his life\'s purpose to find and support an operation which not only put Africans first, but which was run by Africans themselves on the ground./nAs Doran said at the One World Awards at which his resulting film Africa Rising won one of the top prizes: \"Tim dragged me kicking and screaming into Africa, insisting I had to see the Sodo project with my own eyes.\" There was no commitment to make a film of any kind. Looking back, it appears that Brosnan was certain Doran would succumb when confronted with a project that showed Africans themselves taking their people out of poverty./n\"When we arrived in Sodo region, around 120 kilometres south of Addis Ababa, my first and lasting impression was the pride in their faces,\" says Doran. \"This was a region that had been devastated by drought and famine on many occasions in the past and I had expected a nervous, even frightened population as rumours abounded at the time of a new drought. Instead, I found a community confident in itself, certain of its ability to survive by its own means.\"/nJust a week later, on the flight home, it was clear he had caught the bug. Within a matter of months, he would return to Ethiopia to begin a film that would take almost two years to complete with a cast of thousands. Although he does not say it in the following blog, the affect the people of Sodo had upon him will last a lifetime and he still remains in touch with those involved in the project.