Dickinson Teacher's Documentary Looks at the Rainbow Gathering
http://www.jerseycityindependent.com/2010/06/03/dickinson-teachers-documentary-looks-at-the-rainbow-gathering/
By Jon Whiten
Jun 3rd, 2010
Jonathan Kalafer has been teaching in the Jersey City public schools
for nine years. The 34-year-old, pictured seated in the center of the
above photo, started out at Lincoln High but now teaches digital
music and video production at Dickinson High. Three years after he
began teaching in Jersey City, Kalafer also got involved in
documentary film, as an intern on the Oscar-nominated short Sister
Rose's Passion. For 2006's Diary of Immaculee, he moved into the
producer's chair, a familiar spot for men in his family his father,
Steve Kalafer, is a three-time Academy Award nominee who's been
producing independent film for nearly three decades.
With We Love You, Kalafer stepped into the directorial role for the
first time ever. The film, which was produced by the elder Kalafer
and released last year, is an engaging documentary short about the
Rainbow Gathering, an event that's occurred each year since 1972 in a
different U.S. National Forest where tens of thousands of people come
together to celebrate peace, love, harmony, freedom and community.
When he was brainstorming ideas after Diary of Immaculee, Kalafer
drew on his own experience. He had attended a Rainbow Gathering in
Pennsylvania in 1999, and says he "remembered feeling very surprised
that something like that large and amazing wasn't very well known."
He assembled a six-person crew and headed to the 2008 gathering,
which took place in Wyoming's Bridger-Teton National Forest. The end
result is a 39-minute film that began its run on the film festival
circuit last summer, picking up awards at the L.A. International
Short Film Festival and the New Jersey Film Festival. We caught up
with Kalafer in advance of the film's June 7 screening at the Hoboken
International Film Festival (which now actually takes place in Teaneck).
It seems like the Rainbow Gathering is very loosely organized. So
how did you get access? Did you just show up and shoot, or did you
have to clear it with organizers first?
There are no official organizers of the gathering. I did spend about
ten months talking to as many Rainbows as I could about my plan. I
got a range of reactions, but in the end it helped because when we
did finally show up at the gathering in Wyoming there were people
there who knew me. Going into the gathering I had no idea if people
were going to talk to us or just tell us to get lost.
Along the same lines, I'd imagine there were plenty of people out
there wary of a guy with a camera. Did you run into a lot of
resistance, skepticism or outright hostility during the course of the
gathering? If so, how did that make your job more difficult as a storyteller?
Most people I spoke to in pre-production warned me that I could
expect resistance and a couple even alluded to hostility. Many
Rainbows wanted to talk to us about the production so we just had to
take our time. People would stop us on the trail and ask us a couple
of questions and then say something like, "I just wanted to look you
guys in the eyes." People were very defensive because many Rainbows
volunteer a lot of time and resources to the gathering, and some have
been doing it for four decades it is that meaningful to them. It
was tough because we had to hold back and resist the urge to come in
shooting and shoot everything we saw. After a few days, most Rainbows
knew us and they would invite us to shoot and just come out of the
woodwork and help us out.
How, if at all, has shooting this film had an influence on your
teaching? Or, perhaps it went the other way as well did your
experience in the classroom influence the way you approached the film?
For me teaching and learning aren't really separable concepts but
part of the something that exists as a cycle. This project was like
that. Since I teach video production as part of the Media Arts and
Sciences program at Dickinson I would take a little time each week
and brief my classes about the latest production news. I would also
include them in the decision making process. I had my classes look at
the resumes and reels of the crew then vote on who I should go with.
They selected the crew I went with, and I feel they were the perfect
choice. There were a couple of times on the shoot where I definitely
felt like the teacher too.
Tell me about the remarkable scene with the federal agents. What
happened? And have you gotten much pushback from the feds for
including the footage in your film?
That was horrible; I was there for the whole incident. There is a
part of the gathering devoted to families and children called Kid
Village. It is basically a camp for people with kids and they have
crafts and make playgrounds out of trees there.
I was there getting water and this special team of agents called the
ICT (Incident Command Team) come into the camp with someone they had
arrested out on the trail. They had their guns out and were pointing
them everywhere. At one point I looked down and there were red aiming
lasers bouncing around my shirt. One of them started shooting their
pepper-ball gun into the crowd and the pepper spray was everywhere. I
held up my press badge and one of them came up to me, and put his
Taser in my face and said, "I don't give a f**k about your press ID
get down the hill or I'll Tase you." Then they came in with AR-15
Assault rifles.
If it wasn't an event where everyone was there to pray for peace it
would have been a bloodbath.
The Rainbows are interesting, ideologically, in that they seem to
have ideas in common with both the far right and the far left. After
spending some time among the group, do you feel you can place them in
any sort of way on a ideological spectrum? Or are they too loosely
organized as a group? What are their core values?
Interesting that you picked up on that. They really are such an
eclectic group, and you get people from all over the political and
every other spectrum. There are no official ideologies of the
group, though some are more popular than others. The one thing that
seems to bind almost every Rainbow is their participation on the
peace prayer on July 4. But, then again, there are some who don't do
that either.
What do you have planned next?
We are working on a documentary about political corruption in New
Jersey that is nearing completion called The Soprano State [based on
the 2008 book of the same name]. I am curious to see what kind of
reception we will have on the international film festival circuit
with We Love You, as there are now Rainbow Gatherings in places like
China and the Middle East.
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THE DETAILS
Screening of We Love You; Monday, June 7 at 8 pm; at Cedar Lane
Cinemas, 503 Cedar Lane, Teaneck; for more info, click here.
http://www.hobokeninternationalfilmfestival.com/
.
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