Rammadan Mubarak Brothers and Sisters, is there a translation? Somone who understand this for me? Or a video transcript i can translate for this please? Thank you
Jacopetti was looking for a place to film Goodbye Uncle Tom; in peace, with his rhythms and with the systems to which he was accustomed. We needed many masses, many blacks who were not easy to find in America. Of course, some settings had to be made in the United States, but everything was more expensive. The solution was in Haiti; it was a coincidence. I said I'm going to take a trip to the Caribbean and little by little I'm going to see where this thing can be done. In short, I went around all these places and no one said you are welcome, let's make this film, etc. So the last resort was Haiti, and I went to the Italian embassy. Then I said "Ambassador, do you think that..." "Tomorrow we'll go and talk to Duvalier". Inside me I say well, okay let's go. I put on a tie, it was hot as hell, we went the next day, and I met Francois Duvalier. He spoke strange French, but very kindly he told me that he agreed. In Haiti we even managed to get the license plates of the diplomatic corps' cars; 7 license plates, 7 cars, costume van and we get organized. We spent 18 months making this film. We did scenes with as many as 1000-1200 extras, and there were 7 of us in the crew. We shot some scenes, for example on the slave ship, anchored there in the port of Porto Prince, where there were 40 degrees centigrade in the shade, all the parts underneath adapted as in the Nazi concentration camps. They were traveling stowed away, all half naked; then with all the lamps, all the things etc. a temperature...the floor of the ship had become slippery due to the sweat of these people. You can imagine the smell... yet we filmed these scenes. Everyone did a bit of everything; I don't know, my friend who came with me at the time had never seen the cinema, she became a make-up artist, costume designer... you know when you make a film of this magnitude with seven people, everyone has to know how to do everything. We were actors; for example the scenes involving slave hunting in the swamps of New Orleans, which we shot in Haiti in a sort of mangrove field, the one who shoots is me, another is Prosperi and another Jacopetti, perhaps with a couple more moustaches, do you understand? Then every now and then an American tourist would arrive; we caught him and told him to act. Because we didn't have any white people.
