Emily L. Manthei's Blog

March 24th, 2010 | Comments

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The power of both a compliment and a disparaging word are frightening. The weight of either can be almost enough to overtake the soul, buoying it up into the sunset, on the one hand, or crushing it nearly into the hot core of the earth, on the other.

I remember, a few months back, when I got negative, disinterested feedback on a script from two individuals I considered to be smart, knowledgeable and savvy when it comes to my mode of “philosophical cinema.” I had written a heady, original, independent work of staggering obtuseness, and remember being crushed when an academic professor (who had never read a script before) and a Hollywood manager didn’t get it. At all. True, I knew the structure still had problems, and the themes were still a bit tangled, but I thought that the characters and situations remained genuine enough to at least warrant a few positive comments, if not a sort of sick fascination or honest engagement. And, to that point, I had always gotten a nod from readers for my dialogue writing and the general strength of my writer’s voice. These are hard-earned tools in a writer’s toolbelt, and although I think they are not of my own making but rather some genetic predisposition I happen to have been gifted with, I certainly accept the consolation of being able to fall back on these compliments when others do not seem forthcoming. However, in these two circumstances, I was disabused of that safety net and fell squarely on my face when I was told that the weighty themes of my script could not stand up against the scrutiny of a careful reader or the intelligence of an above-average mind. In effect, I was told to stop being so pretentious and write a good character. These blows took weeks of sulking – and even a spell or two of crying – to get over. Subsequently, I left LA for a two and a half month sojourn across 16 time zones and two other continents. If only we were all so lucky…

Today, a little more than two weeks after my return, I was surprised to gauge my sense of elation upon receiving some overwhelmingly positive emails about the Bangladeshi short film project I just finished. (Okay, it’s not quite finished – otherwise it would be here on my website. But it’s in the “beta phase.”) These viewers, who will potentially turn into long-term producers for a series of shorts written and directed by me, told me my short was “fabulous” and that it “blew him away.” From people who are close to strangers in my orbit, this is pretty exciting news. Does it mean I will get the contract with them for dozens more shorts? Well, let’s not jump to conclusions, but at the moment, I seem to like my chances!

Of course, after I had happily chirped away this news to a few friends, I stopped to think… Is this what it means to live and die in LA: that I live and die by the words of a few random yay-sayers or nay-sayers? How shocking and sad and value-less my life has become if these comments, on the extreme ends of the spectrum, can set me spinning so chaotically out of control. Is this what it means to be an artist? I always thought I had a thick skin. And true, I don’t break down or jump for joy on the outside. But having this fragile of an ego isn’t something I like to well, either. Oh, Los Angeles, what kind of demonic monster have you turned me into? Because to live and die in LA is to live and die by the word.

Tags: ego, Hollywood, Los Angeles, short film

3 Years

March 19th, 2010 | Comments

Today is one of those days I can’t help but reflect.

Barnabess

It was three years ago today that my dear little kitty was hit by a car on a neighboring street. The unsuspecting little thing, barely 2 years old, was boundlessly energetic and playful. She was the friendliest cat I’ve ever known, and also the most like a real person. She visited my neighbors when they left their doors open, played with squirrels and birds and took a break from all of her other important business of the day when she knew I was sad or stressed to come visit me and sit on my lap. She and I were inseparable: I flew with her from California and Michigan for Christmas one year to introduce her to the snow. We moved at least three times in our two years together, and were preparing to cross continents together when she left me. My friends loved her, too. Even the ones who didn’t like cats.

I think about the past years, and all that’s happened. The places I have traveled and the people I’ve met. I think about how having Barnabess made me feel like an adult: stable, “real” and responsible. And maybe that was a good feeling, or something I needed to learn, just out of college. But more importantly, I think she taught me to be a better friend.

My life today is much better because she was in it.

Rest in Peace, Barnabess.

Tags: cat, memory

Homecoming

March 5th, 2010 | Comments

Touching down between neat little rows of short and well-manicured buildings, amidst sprawling freeways with cars spaced orderly about and billboards shouting “Welcome to Los Angeles,” I was glad, once again, to be home. I stepped out of the airport and onto the sidewalk of the LAX horseshoe of drop-offs and pick-ups and took in a deep breath of fresh air. Ahhhh. Clean air smelling of nothing but sunshine and blue sky. No unidentifiable stench of rotting garbage. No barely-visible clouds of dust and soot and pollution. No chaos of honking horns and rickshaw bells or piles of broken bricks and rubble. No crowds of anxiously staring men hanging around. And – maybe most shockingly – no one asking me for money.

It was paradise in Inglewood.

Whenever I come back to LA, I nourish this enduring feeling of “home” that I’ve come to recognize as synonymous with this city of paradoxes. While it’s a place that I love and hate, it’s also a place where I’m free to be me. Not only so, but in all its contrariness and spacious lack of community, it also is a very American place: a place where people mix and gather and walk down the street – or drive down the street – with an entirely different set of questions and issues than those people on the other side of the world. In this place, at least, we are free to say and to feel and to think whatever it is that we will, no matter how ungenerous or bigoted or arbitrary.

Freedom is something conspicuously lacking in the daily life of a Bangladeshi. Something I take for granted as an abstract American ideal is immediately obvious when I’m not free to wear the clothes I want, I’m not free to walk alone after dark, I’m not free to go to the movies, I’m not free to go to the market and get charged the same price for a piece of fruit as the person next to me with darker skin, and I’m not free to give hugs or shake hands or do so many of the things I consider natural and meaningless at home.

In some ways, leaving Bangladesh makes me feel like a quitter – the quitter I’m sure everyone else wants to be. When things are so awful and you can come back and have so much, it’s quite easy to feel guilty or lost or unworthy. A few weeks ago, I asked Kent what is the average career span for development workers who live in Bangladesh. He told me the “country director” of major NGOs changes frequently – sometimes every year, or every other year. The current country director of the NGO we did work with had been there for 4 years – a relatively long time for those in his position. In Bangladesh, 5 years of service is a really long time. For missionaries, it’s much longer. While not an entire “career,” he says 20-25 years is the longest most stay.

To me, who has been there for spans of 1 month and 3 months, it seems like a lifetime.

Everybody gets worn out. No one who comes can stay. The tragic level of poverty, disease, and suffering is terrible. There is no way around it. The quality of life, even for those at the upper reaches of society, is laughable. The sky is gray in spite of the sun and dirt settles into a chronic cough that must look like smokers’ lung on the inside. For nearly 150 million people, this is The World. This is what it’s like to be alive. For those of us who have been there, and know what it’s like, the enduring question that runs through our minds is this: “Is there anything we can do?” It’s not really “What can we do,” as if there was some sort of solution that, if everybody just pitched in, could fix “the problem.” There are way too many problems for that. And I’m not convinced that the answer to that question is not “Disperse the population of the country throughout SE Asia and flood the country out of existence.”

Truth be told, Dhaka seems to have only gotten worse in the 4 years since I was last there. And I don’t know what to do about it – what to think. I’m not sure if development can help. And I’m not sure I’m left with anything other than enduring questions.

If you are the kind of person who likes to give money to feel better for how decadently we live in the West, consider the following vetted-by-me organizations that I know are doing good and valuable things, and which are NOT run by corrupt leaders.
SIM Bangladesh’s Salam Training Centre
Bengal Creative Media (my company, BCM)
World Mission Prayer League

Tags: Bangladesh, development, Los Angeles

Change

February 28th, 2010 | Comments

This morning, as my driver Aziz and I pulled up to the Gulshan 2 Circle, I noticed more than ever that changes are afoot.

“Everyone is in their own lane, Aziz bhai,” I commented. “The traffic looks so… tidy.” And indeed, the sloppy mess of rickshaw-between-car-between-baby taxi-between-bicycle-between-car that normally clutters each breathable inch of space (betwixt which beggars manage to knock on car windows one at a time and ask for change) was today evenly divided into four lanes, structured by men in orange vests with handouts telling drivers to mind the red and green lights and to obey the signs. Indeed, the government has recently issued a law requiring vehicles to “stay in the middle of your lane unless indicated by your turn signal, and obey all traffic lights and appropriate street signs.”

This, my friends, is a revolutionary new requirement, unprecedented in potential reach. If Bangladeshis could manage this superhuman feat, the earth might cease its revolutions and cause the sun to bow in honour of this great achievement. However, citizens hold out little hope for such a result, as the scheme, which currently has traffic controllers at maybe 6 or 7 prominent intersections throughout the city, is masterminded and managed by some Japanese firm, anxious to bring their civilized ways to Southeast Asia. The colonial style of such a “modernizing” endeavour is not lost on the people. …

Yes, Minister

February 26th, 2010 | Comments

Today we interviewed some sort of under-secretary to a government minister. His position in the dark, warehouse-like government building was never very clear to me, but he obligingly read off answers to questions about education and the importance of our client’s work with preschools. After the interview, he insisted that we stay for tea and a chat with our young western client, from whom he requested a phone number and address! While this young westerner was very impressed that a minister wanted her business card, I couldn’t help thinking to myself how foolish and backwards it was that he, a “high-profile” government employee, seemed to think some 24-year-old could do something for him simply because she had a British passport. Personally, I despise this sort of shameless “networking,” which serves only the purpose of collecting feathers of western alliances in one’s cap. It makes me feel so used for my whiteness. Then, of course, I feel cynical that I can be so hard on others.

I have started watching a lot of HBO-Asia in the past week, which is a way to quell the evening boredom and remind me of home. Only, the more I watch “Hollywood movies” here in Bangladesh, the cheesier they seem to me. I start to wonder if the very things I find lame and cheesy about Bengali movies aren’t inherently lame and cheesy in their western counterparts as well. Perhaps it’s also because things look worse on a smaller screen, but I have started to question my very own notions of “quality” by seeing the cliches of Hollywood in an outside context. Of course, many of these movies I would have always thought cheesy, because they are made from inside the “machine” that I feel is so unadventurous and lacking in risk or reward. So many of these same movies look just as cheesy and unrealistic to me in America. I just can’t tell if these are cheesy to my western mind or just my Asian one. …

Happy International Mother-Tongue Day

February 22nd, 2010 | Comments

Sadly, I spent most of this year’s annual celebration of all things Bengali with foreigners. I had planned on making the festivities a part of my day, but there was simply too much work to do at the office.

But maybe I should back up and explain some of this mother-tongue stuff. A little history lesson: before India gained its independence from its colonial captors in Britain, the nation included the ethnically separate region which is now Pakistan, and its great Muslim ally in the east, Bangladesh. But India’s struggle for independence created an uprising, and an alliance, between these extreme eastern and western reaches of the country, and in 1947, they declared their independence under the name Pakistan, which later became an Islamic state. All was well and good for about 20 years while this new nation of Muslims found peace. However, trouble was brewing between the larger, stronger region of West Pakistan, and its little brother, East Pakistan. With little government representation and even less in terms of aid for the never-ending flood of natural disasters (cyclones, floods, mudslides), Bengali Pakistanis were disgruntled, to say the least. But the straw that broke the camel’s back was West Pakistan’s insistence that East Pakistan adopt Urdu as the official language. And that was the end: there was rioting in the streets. Major uprisings. Bengali, spoken since the 8th century among not just 150 million East Pakistanis, but almost an equal number of Indians in West Bengal, was under attack. And, in 1971, after a bloody war that lasted for 9 months and borrowed the support of Indian forces (take that, Pakistan!), the nation of Bangladesh was created.

So, today we celebrate the mother tongue: the language of the people. The language fought for by the people. The language that will never die.

Beauty School

February 20th, 2010 | Comments

This is me with laughably big hair

This afternoon, I took a beauty-making trip to the salon to get my hair dyed with henna. For some inexplicable reason, I have had the urge to dye my hair in a bright-hot shade of red for months now. It started with an innocent trip to Superdrug in Edinburgh, on a whim meant to make my boyfriend cringe in disapproval. As we walked down the aisle of chemical-packed colours with names like “Egyptian Bronze” and “Honeysuckle Tan,” I gravitated to the electric-shock, neon-orange varieties of a colour called “ginger” in British-English (we Americans would just say “red”). But in the end, as usual, my pragmatic, holistic-thinking mind decided to save my scalp from ingredients like 4-ParaPhenyleneDiamine and C6H8N2. Generally, I try not to put things into my body whose names look like airline ticket confirmation codes.

So when I arrived in Bangladesh, it occurred to me that henna must be the answer! I had seen its affects on our wise old grandfather-like driver, Aziz: shots of bright color streaked through his dark brown hair. Surely, I reasoned, henna must be the magic bullet for overzealously coloured hair!

So I walked into the salon today, comforted by the unusual dominance of ladies: three surrounded the cash register, while their mothers and older sisters casually painted fingernails, trimmed toes, and plucked eyebrows with concentration and precision while idle copies of Cosmopolitan and Vogue lay discarded on the tables. I picked one up. The atmosphere of a women’s beauty salon, always familiar the world over, gave me a certain comfort in the rough world a Bangla-land. Not to mention, supporting a business in which women did all of the taking and making of money felt summarily pleasant. …

Tags: Bangladesh, beauty, feminisim

The Club

February 19th, 2010 | Comments

Since I have been sick for the better part of this week, it seems an ideal time to mention a fairly well-kept secret haven for foreigners in Dhaka. As you might have heard me mention before, this is not the easiest place to live. What with the restrictive dress code, lack of green spaces, and all around absence of any sort of “resort” atmosphere to escape to when times get tough and homesickness is at its worst, Dhaka needs a refuge.

And it’s called the American Club. Now, don’t get me wrong – the British have one too. And so do the Germans, and the “Nordics” (okay, so there weren’t enough members at the Finnish Club and they had to expand their reach). And I think the Canadians have one too. But that’s beyond the scope of this exploration: I’ll just stick with the American Club.

When I first arrived here, I thought it was a bit pretentious and oh-so-racist, even, to have a private gathering place for rich white people in which the Bengalis served as the “lower class.” I had never belonged to a private club before in my life, and could just imagine the lavish golf courses with dark brown caddies toting around golf clubs for the affluent white folk. I despised it immediately. And my impression didn’t immediately change when I stepped inside as a guest of the boss and saw the rows upon rows of blooming flowers and mostly-green grass in the otherwise brown and dry climate, stretching over a city of dust and rubble. My boss’s wife casually slipped off her orna, the gold-standard for female modesty, mandatorily worn like a shawl-and-headscarf over any other piece of clothing a woman wears: if she doesn’t have her orna, she’s fresh meat on the street – even in the raging-hot summer temperatures. …

Tags: Bangladesh

Is Development Work a Sham?

February 14th, 2010 | Comments

We spent this weekend shooting 4-year-olds at a preschool which is one in a series of “pilot program” preschools that are supposed to improve the overall quality of education in Bangladesh. The theory is, if kids are more prepared for primary school, they will stay in school longer and lower the 40% dropout rate. And, as the story goes, with more education, kids will grow up to be more productive adults, ending the cycle of poverty and causing real social change and decreased poverty. Meanwhile, my Bangladeshi co-workers, who themselves have defeated the cycle of poverty (after all, they have good jobs working at my company, are well educated, and support their families), don’t want their kids to grow up in Bangladesh. And they certainly don’t want them to be educated here. It seems that the people of this country have lost hope themselves in any sort of large-scale, developmental change.

I pondered this dramatic inconsistency during our entire shoot. I used to think that development was development, no matter who did it: faith-based NGOs, or strictly needs-based secular NGOs. People need food in their mouths and clothes on their backs, right? People need a sustainable way to live beyond a hand-to-mouth existence. And that in itself is the purpose of development. If you want to proselytize along the way, that is great, as long as the immediate need is being met; after all, people won’t listen to how much Jesus loves them if you’re not meeting their in-the-moment needs also. But our work with this secular NGO is really changing my opinion. Because if education gets better, and then the educated just flee the country, then what hope is there of making a lasting impact on government or society? The dramatically overlooked factor here is the power of faith and morality to affect a society: the overwhelming impact that the gospel of Christ has on a society whose highest value is not getting caught. This country of supposedly religious people values an honor vs. shame sort of facade, but when it comes down to it, their belief has no moral impact on their actions. And it is only education coupled with an upbringing in integrity – integrity not based on rules and discipline, but on a condition of the heart – that will cause major societal change in Bangladesh. …

Tags: Bangladesh, humanitarian work

A Day in the Life…

February 12th, 2010 | Comments

Portrait04 Well, today was our bonus shoot of the short film I concepted and wrote last week: way to think on our feet! I can hardly believe it all came together. Unfortunately, my friend, cohort and DP, Dan, ate some bad curry yesterday and spent most of the day with a rotten stomach, sleeping it off and puking. However, he did manage to stay with us during the morning, just long enough to instruct our light guys to hang c-stands sideways from the ceiling with twine (and yes, they had lights on the ends of them) and blow a mountain of créme brulée-smelling canned fog into our small shooting room, causing me a sore throat I kept with me through the rest of the day. But notwithstanding our newly acquired stomach and respiratory illnesses, the shoot went great.

In spite of starting a few hours late due to tardy actors (who knew actors could be primadonnas – that came as a complete shock to me!), we actually finished an hour ahead of schedule (putting us at merely a 13-hour day!), thanks to some creative shot re-planning and a few blessed daylight exterior shots. For the most part, our actors were pretty good, although one was a bit of the classically overzealous Bengali ilk, flailing his arms and contorting his face like a clown. But it was all for the better, as our parable slowly transformed from a simple morality tale to a tongue-in-cheek rendering of a thought-provoking story, complete with a comedic, almost Spaced-like style. When you consider the carefully-conceived melodrama of Bengali movie posters, often with blood and guts, guns and babes, the simplicity and boredom of the movies is somewhat disappointing; but I think we’ll deliver on that same high bar of cheesiness, contributing the added bonus of a good story. More than anything I’ve ever done, I think it will inspire both thought and laughter.

Tags: Bangladesh, film, movie stars