Recovery and Reportage » CI work on “We Are the World” featured: Huffington Post

17 February 2010

We Are The World, “Nou Se Mond La”

Last week the new “We Are the World” video, dedicated to Haiti, aired during the Opening Ceremony of the Winter Olympics, and I’m really proud to have been a part of the experience. A key component of the project is a group of Haitian students from the Cine Institute, a film school in Jacmel, a city on the southern coast of Haiti. Jacmel, like so much of Haiti, was devastated, and the Institute was not spared. Luckily, none of the students were seriously injured, and they started filming immediately, turning their cameras toward the aftermath, documenting the wreckage and the relief effort. David Belle, the Cine Institute’s director, rushed to Jacmel to check on his students, and on the way, he was contacted by his friend and colleague Paul Haggis, who asked him to coordinate his students into traveling to Los Angeles to experience the video up close. Ten students arrived at the recording session a few days later, with cameras in hand to record the ‘making of’ the video, but were surprised to learn that they would also became part of the chorus, and part of the video.