Daydream fuelled Sundance documentary
B.C. film-maker wanted a story about two children living radically different lives.
By Kevin Griffin.
Source: Vancouver Sun. Tuesday, January 14, 2003
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An idea born daydreaming on the bus between the University of BC and Tsawwassen has resulted in a local filmmaker creating a short film that's been chosen for Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival.

Called Olivia's Puzzle, the 12-minute documentary by Jason DaSilva depicts the different lives of two seven-year-old girls: one who lives in Ladner, and the other in the village of Aldona, Goa, the former Portuguese colony in India.

DaSilva's film will play five times at the Park City, Utah film festival known around the world as one of the premiere venues for independent film-makers. It will be shown several times along with The Murder of Emmett.

Till, a Stanley Nelson documentary about the 1955 murder of an African-American teenager in the Mississippi Delta which helped spark the civil rights movement in the U.S.

DaSilva's film has already won first prize at the Chicago International Children's Film Festival. It premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival and has shown at several other film festivals around the world.

DaSilva, 24, conceded he doesn't really know that much about Redford -- something which surprised his mother. But he said when he travels to Park City, he wouldn't mind meeting the famous actor and director -- and using the festival as an opportunity to market his film.

"It'll be fun -- after all the festivals I've been to, I've learned how to schmooze really well," he said.

The Sundance Institute was founded in 1981 by Redford to showcase independent films. By 1985, it grew to encompass an existing film festival in Utah and officially became the Sundance Film Festival in 1991. This year's festival runs from Thurday to Jan. 26.

DaSilva got the idea for Olivia's Puzzle while on the bus home after a sociology class at UBC. He thought that the best way to show how socialization and the environment shape individuals would be to make a documentary about two children living in radically different situations.

He first wanted to make a film about two boys but couldn't find the right subjects. With help from his family, who are from Goa, he was able to find two girls: one is his cousin Olivia Athaide who lives in Ladner. The other is Reshma Sham Kamulekar from Goa.

DaSilva's grandmother Irene also played a critical role in the making of the Olivia's Puzzle. Since Reshma doesn't speak English and DaSilva doesn't speak Konkani, the native language of Goa, his grandmother acted as the all-important intermediary who translated for everyone.

The film shows the two seven-year-olds at school, talking with their friends, the foods they eat and how they see themselves in the world. The puzzle, DaSilva said, is how Olivia views her own culture and her awareness of it as a child.

DaSilva said one of the major contrasts between the lives of the two children is when they talk about the future.

"Olivia says that when she grows up, she might be an artist or a dance teacher. Reshma says she'll get married, have kids and work in the fields," DaSilva said.

"Reshma won't have that opportunity to do anything different."

DaSilva said he doesn't see himself sticking exclusively with making documentaries. He'd like to move back and forth between fiction and non-fiction -- citing Mira Nair, who started out making documentaries and has also made the hit feature films Salaam Bombay! and Monsoon Wedding.

Interested in comics as a youngster, DaSilva added sound and motion to his narrative skills while at Emily Carr School of Art and Design. For several years he also created Good Tasty Comic for Discorder, the magazine published by CITR, the student radio station at UBC.

More information on DaSilva and Olivia's Puzzle is available at http://www.oliviaspuzzle.com

Grandfather's Clock
by Victor Rangel-Ribeiro

In my grandfather's house, where I lived as a child, I remember a clock striking the hours and half hours. At night the mellow yet resonant chimes echoed through the house, but the clock would not strike without first producing a prolonged whirrr, like a rattlesnake warning of danger.

No danger lurked in that house when I was a child, but it was a different story altogether when my grandfather was alive. In those days, Ranes were frequent visitors, Rauji Rane among them, because my grandfather edited and published a weekly newspaper in this very house, and the paper---the "Correo de Goa"--was very much pro-Goan. An almost complete file exists in the Central Library in Panjim; the only missing copies are the ones that I suspect the Government found so offensive that they confiscated them, shutting down the Correo twice.

Some years ago I was allowed to browse through those files. In one editorial, Hipolito Caetano Pinto complains about the calibre of the newest appointee to be Governor-General of Goa; it seems, he says, that Lisbon thinks so little of us that any absolute nonentity can be sent to rule over us, even a lowly lieutenant in the navy. And in desperation he cries out: "In the name of God, leave us alone!"

Family tradition tells us that the Portuguese would not leave him alone. Every now and then the mundkars would come running to our house, to warn him: "Bhatkara, godde etat!" But when the horsemen who had been sent to arrest him cantered up to our gate and strode up our steps, Hipolito Caetano Pinto was nowhere to be found.

Once, after searching the entire house and getting no answers from my grandmother, an officer sat my mother, then a child of five, on his lap, and gently asked, "Tell us, child, where is your father?"

She could not tell him, because she did not know he was still in the house, hiding in a bumhyar. Twice he and his brilliant young brother-in-law, the lawyer Mariano Vaz from Anjuna, had to flee to Bombay to escape the wrath of the Portuguese, most notably when Gomes da Costa implicated them, and their friend the Visconde de Bardez, in the Rane rebellion of 1895.

Hipolito Caetano Pinto's portrait still hangs on the wall of the family living room; it shows us a young man, perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties. a man who wears a troubled look and seems to have much on his mind. His eyes are averted. I stand before him and a thousand questions crowd my own mind.

Alas, my grandfather died in 1897, almost thirty years before I was born, but my grandmother lived on until 1941, and she had much to tell us about him. But I was barely a teenager then, and though I loved her stories, I had no sense of history, no inkling at all of the importance of oral tradition and the links it can provide to our past. My father, too, who was born in 1881, had stories to tell about those days, and his own involvement in the Rane revolt. Though as a teenage cadet he served on the opposite side, his admiration for the Ranes, particularly Rauji, was unbounded.

Death has silenced all those voices, and the files of the Correo de Goa now sit unexamined in the Central Library, gathering dust along with hundreds of other valuable documents of past centuries -- they are now deemed to be too fragile to be looked at by anyone.

So the whirring grandfather clock was right---the passage of time does indeed pose a danger. Not only do we lost bits of oral history as each older generation dies out, but our written documents are in danger of becoming inaccessible as well.

The rest of the world preserves such documents on microfiche. We don't. "There's no money in it," a noted young historian told me recently. "There's money in restoring a decaying historical building, but there's no money in preserving a document."

Should we let our heritage die?

Tick tock.

Bruce De Souza, awarded $58,000 Scholarship to Lester B. Pearson College in Victoria, BC

Bruce De Souza, son of Mathew & Theresa De Souza of Montrea, Canada, and grandson of Caetano & Regina De Souza of the famous Souza Sunshine Bar in Entebbe, Uganda, was awarded a $58,000 Scholarship to Lester B. Pearson College in Victoria, BC. At his high school graduation ceremony last June, he received many accolades, among which include the Lieutenant-Governor of Quebec Award, Class of 2002 Silver Award, Class of 2002 Honour Society, Fermat Canadian Mathematics Competition, McGill University Science Award, as well as various subject distinctions. He was also elected Most Outstanding Male Student Award by his graduating class.
From Nick DeMello

Victor Menezes - A scintillating star of the Indian diaspora
http://www.goacom.com/goatoday/2001/dec/coverstoryprofile.html