WESTMINSTER — Brava, brava, brava to local filmmaker, humanitarian, and educator, Teresa Savel.
The Dec. 1 premier showing of her film Palomita (its name translates to “little dove”) at the Bellows Falls Opera House was a life-altering and -affirming experience.
This documentary jewel enabled viewers to connect our local concerns for child care and women's care directly to a small village in Peru dealing with the same issues.
The film opens at the Kurn Hattin Homes for Children in Westminster, where a girl receives a cloth doll as a prize in a school drawing. We then journey to the small village of Q'ewar in Peru, where the doll was one of hundreds handmade by 47 poor village women to provide employment for them and schooling for their children.
This film project came full circle through Savel's vision, perseverance, and dedication to these women doll makers to educate our community and the world about one tiny fraction of need globally that we are frequently unaware of.
Savel takes us through personal profiles of five village women, following them in their daily family work as well as walking over dirt paths to the center where they create these exceptional cloth dolls.
Each woman has withstood hardships and this work of making dolls enables them a break in their sometimes backbreaking existence. It is an opportunity of community with fellow women for laughter and enjoyment while making dolls to provide income for them as well as money for a school that they are in the process of building.
Savel was able to make this film by using local equipment and expertise from the Falls Area Cable Television (FACT-TV) in Bellows Falls. She travelled to Peru with Jacob Stradling, former director of FACT-TV, to document everything. She returned and began the arduous and time-consuming job of editing and contacting local talent for narration as well as more local filming.
So, from Westminster, Vermont to Q'ewar, Peru and back again, we have travelled and learned how to help those in need.
This first-time filmmaker has impressed me as a humanitarian of the highest degree and brought home to us all the goodness and connectedness that we can value in this time of political and economic dissension.
Brava, brava, Ms. Savel!