Alliance for Independent Motion Media

Rain in A Dry Land

Rain in a Dry Land is a searingly intimate portrait of two families who leave behind a legacy of slavery in Africa to discover new challenges in 21st century America.

Film Description

Rain in a Dry Land is a riveting portrait of families in transition. After thirteen years in refugee camps, two Somali Bantu families arrive in twenty-first century America, a world as strange to them as the moon. Their poetry, humor, and amazing resilience shows us our own world through new eyes.

News:

Variety Review of Rain in a Dry Land by John Anderson

Rigorously intimate and disarmingly affectionate, "Rain in a Dry Land" is in the forefront of the current crop of immigration chronicles, a docu that illuminates a stratum of U.S. life as much as it does the plight of the African emigre. In following two subject families in their transition from Somalian refugee camp to underclass America, filmmaker Anne Makepeace never reduces them to devices or symbols or anything less than human beings caught in the cross-hairs of global politics. The film's honesty and grit should give it wide appeal and a healthy embrace from festivals.

Gorgeously, purposefully shot by vet lenser Joan Churchill and her son, Barney Broomfield, and edited a with sure and sympathetic hand by Mary Lampson, pic focuses on an oppressed minority within an oppressed minority: Somali Bantus who, as the descendants of slaves, were ostracized in Somalia, and managed to escape into Kenya during the civil war in the early '90s.

Makepeace picks up their story 13 years into life at the Kakuma refugee camp (home to refugees from various African wars) and follows two families -- single mother Arbai Barre Abdi and her children, and married couple Aden Kabir Edow and Madina Ali Yunye and their children -- as they are prepped for life in a land where they won't understand even how to descend a flight of stairs.

Makepeace, whose previous films include "Robert Capa in Love and War" and "Baby It's You," has chosen two female characters who couldn't be more different. Through them, she emphasizes the individuality of people who all too often blend in the public mind into a single, indistinct, disenfranchised mass. Both women have experienced horrors, but nothing seems able to blot the sunshine of Arbai's personality. Madina, on the other hand, wears her war grief like a scar. The way Makepeace unobtrusively but insistently traces the fault lines of Madina and Aden's marriage provides a kind of dark undercurrent that informs all the other troubles they face.

Joel Goodman's music, a wedding of African influences and blues, makes its own gradual transition as the film progresses, moving from an African to a more Americanized vernacular as the two families become more accustomed to their new homes--Arbai in Atlanta, Madina and Aden in Springfield, Mass. -- and their children adjust, or maladjust, to their problems.

One noteworthy aspect is that Makepeace's movie never fails to be cinematic regardless of how free-form the director is forced to be, or how difficult the circumstances of a given scene; it almost feels that the film is blessed. Even if the subjects of "Rain in a Dry Land" have much to rail against in their lives, they can be grateful for such a compassionate telling of what is often a heartbreaking story.

Screenings:

Woods Hole Film Festival August 2006

Fire Island Golden Wagon Film Festival, July 2006

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival New York, June 2006

Atlanta Film Festival Atlanta, June 2006

The Berkshire International Film Festival Great Barrington, MA, May 2006

Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Durham, NC, April 2006 Winner of the 2006 Full Frame Film Festival's Working Films Award

Stories from the Field (United Nations Documentary Film Festival) New York, April 2006

Santa Barbara International Film Festival Santa Barbara, February 2006

Biographies

Anne Makepeace Writer, Producer, Director, has been making award-winning independent films for twenty years. Her new feature documentary, RAIN IN A DRY LAND, winner of the Full Frame Working Films Award, will be broadcast nationally on the POV series in 2007. Her previous film, Robert Capa in Love and War, premiered at Sundance and was broadcast PBS's American Masters, the BBC, and many other foreign stations. The film won a national prime time Emmy and the Voice for Humanity Award at Telluride MountainFilm. COMING TO LIGHT, Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indians, was short-listed for an Academy Award, premiered at Sundance 2000, and was broadcast on American Masters/PBS in 2001 as well as on Arte and other foreign stations. The film won the O'Connor Award for Best Film from the American Historical Association, an Award of Excellence from the American Anthropological Association, a Gold Hugo award from Chicago, Best Documentary at Telluride, and many other awards. Her personal documentary, Baby It's You, premiered at Sundance 1998, screened at South by Southwest, was the lead show on POV's 1998 season, and was broadcast on Channel 4's True Stories series. Baby It's You also screened at the Whitney Biennial 2000. Makepeace has also written, produced, and/or directed many dramatic films. She has twice been a writer/director fellow at the Sundance Institute, and served on the Sundance 2001 Film Festival's documentary jury. She recently completed a short film on Eleanor Roosevelt, entitled Eleanor Roosevelt, Close to Home. She is currently worki ed by Pacem Productions; and is also producing the first 90-minute episode of a five part series on Native Americans for the American Experience/WGBH

Awards