Bella Macleod
Features Editor
Junior Leo Schleyer traveled across the world for the expedition of a lifetime. Schleyer ventured to Mali from Nov. 12-21 to work as an assistant cameraman, filming a documentary to raise awareness about life, environmental problems and injustices in Southern Mali.
He traveled alongside family friend and filmmaker Dodge Billingsley and with the non-governmental organization Ouélessébougou Alliance, which improves the health and education of villages in Africa.
“I felt the need to do [a] service trip, but I wanted something authentic and genuine,” Schleyer said. “I wanted to be able to feel like I am making a difference without being a tourist and just kind of experiencing another countryfor what it is and living with the people who live there.”
Schleyer heard about the opportunity to become Billingsley’s assistant cameraman nine months ago and immediately prepared himself for the expedition.
“We were helping not in a direct sense, but we were hoping through our documentary that it would be aired through the states and it would raise awareness of the situation and the plight of the Malian people,” Schleyer said.
Schleyer and Billingsley want the documentary to highlight areas of Mali where there has been little to no coverage and show the dilemmas of the Malian people from the Northern Mali conflict began. They also wanted to create awareness for the region’s environmental problems and advertise the work of the Ouélessébougou Alliance who also brought in doctors from Park City, Utah.
“We want to try and evoke an emotional response in our audience and try and raise awareness and funding to make a full scale movie to be the voice for the injustices that are going on in [Mali],” Schleyer said.
Schleyer and Billingsley conducted interviews with the Malian locals in order to address issues such as health care, unemployment, agriculture and government initiatives on the current war there.
“It was extremely humbling meeting people, and it kind of gave me a perspective because these people were eating one meal a day, boys are working in the fields at 11 years old and girlsare getting married at 13,” Schleyer said.
Schleyer flew from Detroit to Paris alongside Billingsley and then to their final destination of Bamako, the capital of Mali. For the majority of the trip, only Schleyer and Billingsley traveled together; however, the Ouélessébougou Alliance provided them advocates, translators and set up interviews and meetings.
“On the trip it was pretty much just [Billingsley] and I because we didn’t have huge budgets so we tried to only bring what was necessary,” Schleyer said. “He felt that the both of us could adequately make the film with some help from other social workers,” Schleyer said.
For about half of the trip, Schleyer and Billingsley stayed at the Ouélessébougou Alliance’s compound. They also had a driver which allowed them to transport their gear and equipment efficiently while filming and traveling across Mali.
“My second night in the hotel, I woke up for the fifth time since the power had gone out again and as I tried to go back to sleep, I heard some noise in the hallway so I grabbed the knife under my pillow and went to the door to see three men beating another man against the hallway,” Schleyer said. “It was a harsh reminder that I was not at home anymore.”
In addition to interviewing locals, Schleyer and Billingsley interviewed leaders of non-governmental organizations working out in Mali in order to gain inside perspectives and opinions of the country.
“I take cinematic arts at Mira Costa as my elective, and the trip kind of coincided perfectly with my interests so I was able to use what I’ve learned in the past three years at Costa and extrapolate it to my experience in Mali,” Schleyer said.
In the beginning of the trip, Schleyer drove down to Ouélessébougou, a part of Mali in the southern region to stay at the Ouélessébougou Alliance compound where he and Billingsley were able to work on certain aspects of the documentary, including editing, translating and transcribing. However, their days mainly consisted of shooting and conducting interviews for about 12 hours a day, Schleyer said.
“The alliance helped us with things that we couldn’t really manage on our own so it made the
trip much more feasible, and we were able to travel through the country with ease,” Schleyer said.
Approximately six days into the trip, Schleyer and Billingsley met the doctors from Utah who perform cornea and cataract surgeries on the locals. Schleyer and Billingsley captured firsthand footage of the struggling medical conditions of patients in Mali, which helped them address the absence of welfare plan for subjects of the documentary, Schleyer said.
“Part of our main focus of the trip was to document all the surgeries and do ethnographies on some of the patients,” Schleyer said. “If you were sick, you have to deal with it on your own using alternative medicine because nobody has the means to be able to pay for professional medical treatment, which is heartbreaking.”
During their free time, Schleyer and Billingsley filmed B-roll for the documentary of people walking around local shops and markets. They also flew a drone above the villages for footage on agricultural sustainability and the micro dams brought by the Islamic Relief that enabled local villages to have water.
“It was fascinating walking amongst the Malian people getting a glimpse of what life was like in an impoverished nation,” Schleyer said. “It is one thing to hear about these things on the news but to live with these people takes on a whole new meaning.”
Schleyer and Billingsley also filmed the service work of the alliance groups for advertisement purposes. One day they filmed the Ouélessébougou Alliance bringing notebooks and supplies to the public schools in Mali.
“We’ve never met any of the kids and all of them were just happy to see us for really no reason but just to meet us and hangout with us for a little which was a really amazing experience,” Schleyer said.
At one point in the trip, Schleyer came across a family that had been living in Mali for generations and lived in a town called Semejé. The father worked in the fields and became ill after inhaling herbicides for many years, forcing his eldest son to take over the job. The family struggled to pay for medical expenses due to the lack of healthcare in Mali.Schleyer recognized that the grandmother of the family was blind and later convinced doctors to perform cataract surgery to help her see for the first time in years.
“To be able to facilitate that kind of help for her and the family was a cool experience and kind of just made me think why I should be doing more, which is why I strived to make a change by making the documentary to the best of our abilities,” Schleyer said.
Billingsley’s film company, Combat Films and production team will edit the video footage to complete the documentary, a process that will take a few months, Schleyer said. Schleyer will translate interviews for accurate closed captions because he is fluent in French, the official language in Mali.
“Just the irony of it, I came back on Thanksgiving, and going into a huge indulgent meal with my family, it just feels like a weird way of giving thanks,” Schleyer said. “I felt very privileged when I got home since the people there are living day to day just trying to stay alive. We were here just giving thanks by eating an indulgent meal with our family. [It] made me reflect on how lucky we are to be born in a place like this, in a community like this.”
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