Wanda's Picks Radio Show Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Father with daughter Coumba

Rachel Rosen is the director of programming for the San Francisco Film Society. She was director of programming for Film Independent and the Los Angeles Film Festival for eight years. Previously, Rosen was associate director of programming for the San Francisco International Film Festival where she programmed for seven years.  She has worked in various capacities for the New York Film Festival, New York’s Film Forum, and Tri-Star Pictures. A graduate of Stanford University’s Master of Arts program in Documentary Film, Rosen directed Serious Weather, a short documentary that was shown at the Vancouver and San Francisco International Film Festivals, and the British Short Film Festival. She is an occasional contributor on the subject of documentary film to Film Comment magazine.

Amaday, Coumba's classmate
and friend

Younger Sister Debo

Jeremy Teicher, Director writes:

Coumba's Mother

Tall as the Baobab Tree is about standing up for your beliefs and doing what you feel is right, no matter what. To me, the film speaks to the energy and idealism of youth while portraying a very stark and realistic world where change is two steps forward and one step back, where the invincibility of youth bends beneath the harsh realities of life – but is not stamped out.

Inspired by my work with local students, I wanted to tell a story that captures the emotions of the traditional and modern worlds colliding.Jeremy Teicher, Director / Co-Producer / Co-writer bio

Jeremy Teicher is a Student Academy Award-nominated director whose first feature film, Tall as the Baobab Tree (Grand comme le Baobab)   (2012), is garnering acclaim from festivals around the world. Tall as the Baobab Tree won the “Best Feature Narrative” award from the Doha-Giffoni jury at Doha-Tribeca Film Festival and was ranked in the top 20 out of over 170 feature films by audience vote at International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Tall as the Baobab Tree is inspired by Jeremy’s ground breaking documentary short, This is Us (2011), which was awarded a prestigious Lombard Public Service Fellowship, supported by Kodak, and earned Jeremy a nomination for a Student Academy Award.

Both films were shot on location in a rural village in Senegal, Africa, with the documentary premiering at the American Embassy in Dakar to international media coverage. Jeremy graduated cum laude from Dartmouth College where he studied Film, English, and Theater.

The cast is made up of local villagers playing roles that mirror their own lives: the two main characters, Coumba and her sister Debo, are played by real-life sisters who actually are the first kids from their family to go to school. The role of the mother is played by a local woman who was herself a young bride. A young man who never had the opportunity to get an education plays the older brother, a character who has never gone to school.

http://tallasthebaobabtree.com/photos/