Jeff Zimbalist is a 29-year-old film professional best known for “Favela Rising”, a documentary shot in one of hundreds of favelas (slums) in Rio de Janerio.  The film focuses on the personal transformation of Anderson Sá, a former drug trafficker who established the grassroots AfroReggae movement in an effort to use music and education to draw youth away from a life of crime and drugs. It was named the Film of the Year by the International Documentary Association, won the Best Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award at the Tribeca Film Festival, was named Best Documentary at the Sydney International Film Festival and it was short listed for best documentary for the Academy Awards.

 

Zimbalist attended high school in Northampton, Massachusetts, and earned his bachelor’s degree in modern culture and media studies with a concentration in Art Semiotics at Brown University, where he also avidly studied Latin America and topics in development theory. He was an AMIGOS Volunteer in Ecuador in 1995 and returned on Project Staff in 1998 in the Dominican Republic. During his senior year at Brown University, Zimbalist undertook an ambitious project for AMIGOS to capture footage in five countries for a the AMIGOS video. Since then, he has done several documentaries in Latin America and is known for his work that empowers marginalized communities in developing areas. AMIGOS recently caught up with Zimbalist to chat with him about his AMIGOS experience, his recent filmmaking success and his advice for other young people interested in making a profound difference.

 

AMIGOS: What did you learn from your AMIGOS experience?

Zimbalist: I am going to repeat the things most alumni say. AMIGOS gives you a ton of confidence and a lot of faith that it is possible to connect with people that are so distant culturally, geographically, economically. Another benefit is that through my work in those communities with AMIGOS, I learned about grassroots inside out models of community development, the ability for marginalized collectives to use the assets they already have available to initiate effective change on their own terms, and as a part of this process I discovered the infinite potential to use self-representation as a vehicle for empowerment.

 

AMIGOS: What did you learn from working on the AMIGOS video?

Zimbalist: A lot of documentaries have footage with an omniscient “voice of God” narrator, which drains the personal connection to the film’s characters by creating a distance between viewer and subject. I have learned that you go for the emotional connection between viewer and subject by giving voice to personal stories that let viewers identify with community members, volunteers and staff without getting caught up in organizational rhetoric.

 

The AMIGOS project was the first grant that I ever received. It was a very ambitious project for me as a 21-year-old. The experience helped me build a foundation for my skills and gave me confidence. It was really powerful that AMIGOS believed in me when I was that young – to let me do a five-country video. After that I felt confident enough to propose bigger projects.

 

AMIGOS: How did the “Favela Rising” project get started?

Zimbalist: I was teaching at the New York Film Academy and one student who had recently gotten wealthy in the .com bubble (Co-Producer of “Favela Rising”, Matt Mochary) and I became good friends. He had listened to me talk about my mission to use media to expose more positive stories coming from the developing world. We had the same ideology – that filmmaking should be used as a prescriptive tool to activate viewers when they leave the theater to involve themselves in processes of change in their own communities.

 

At a philanthropy conference, he came across two leaders of the AfroReggae movement and he knew they were perfect characters. He convinced me to quit my job and fly to Brazil. We started out with a bunch of stories and narrowed it down to Anderson Sá because we realized that his story was so compelling that we didn’t need all of the other characters. It was my most mature experience in the process of filmmaking, and since then I’ve been able to see storylines and develop stories that can reach bigger audiences.

 

AMIGOS: How do you empower community members to tell their stories?

Zimbalist: We try to make the community part of the process. A very important part of “Favela Rising” was giving cameras to the children. That was the only way to give the footage authentic life. We were saying to them, “Tell me how you would like to be represented.” We teach them how to use the equipment and be involved in the process, but it is also important to get their input in the editing stages and for them to help make fundamental story-telling and cultural representation choices.

 

As a media maker, you learn a lot about seeing the world from a different perspective and breaking away from norms when collaborating with authentic, instinctive voices eager to tell their stories to the world in fresh new visual and auditory languages. By allowing these grassroots voices to drive the narrative in "Favela Rising" we were better able to capture the actual sensations of life in the favela, to close the perceived geographic and cultural gap between life here and there. You can always find ways to make people relate to each other on the most fundamental human level.

 

AMIGOS: Why do you think media is so powerful when it comes to breaking cultural barriers?

Zimbalist: People’s world views are created by the media that they have access to. If all first-world citizens are given access to is media of the third world falling apart, then naturally they will think the entire developing world is falling apart. We who have had the blessing of traveling and living with hard to reach communities have had the privilege of finding people who really are making a positive difference in developing countries. If media can start to tell more stories of people in underdeveloped countries taking positive action, of communities that work, then people in the overdeveloped world will broaden their understanding to see the world as a place that is also fighting effectively to come together. 

  

AMIGOS: What is your family like?

Zimbalist: My dad was a Latinamericanist, and I grew up hearing about all of his adventures in Latin America. My brother (27-year-old Michael Zimbalist, also an AMIGOS alumnus: Volunteer in Ecuador, 1997, and Project Staff in Mexico, 2000) and I grew up learning about the changes my dad was contributing. A lot of my dreams and visions have always incorporated Latin America. It is a very alive and charged place. I think that is why my brother and I are both working in Latin America. My younger brother is in drama. He has started Spanish stage theater companies in Mexico. We are currently working on a movie together. If you take his drama experience and my documentary experience, we make a great team to do fiction film. My mom is an artist and my dad the Latinamericanist, so if you put that all together, it makes sense you get one son who’s a documentary filmmaker on Latin American themes and my brother working in theater in Mexico.

 

AMIGOS: What project are you working on currently?

Zimbalist: I am working with my brother on a fiction feature film called “The Scribe of Urabá” based on a true story in Colombia about the first ever official Comunidad de Paz, or community of peace. Like Favela Rising, another inspiring story of an innocent community in a place of terrible crisis and conflict who find an innovative model of hope which allow them to rise up and become leaders. These Colombian campesinos were caught in the cross fire of a civil war that they wanted nothing to do with and they began documenting the social injustices and sending them out to the world for witness. The community has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for its actions. Talk about an inspiring story in a place that most people saw as a lost cause!