Screenings: Today the Hawk Takes One Chick, Leona’s Sister Gerri
Jane Gillooly has a background in photography, design and interdisciplinary media. She is a professor of Film at the School of The Museum of Fine Arts.
Gillooly brought forth her most recent work, Today the Hawk Takes One Chick with co-producer Tracey Kaplan, a South African native who now lives in the Boston area.. This documentary is about the gogo (‘Gogo’ is a Swazi term of endearment for ‘granny.’), a limited supply of grandmothers who in the remote villages and homesteads take care of the thousands of orphaned children left behind by all the young adults that have died of AIDS.
While in Swaziland, Gillooly and Kaplan were hosted by the Cabrini Mission (which has electricity. They took a two person Sony camera package with them and hired a DP there to translate. To prepare the nuns at the Cabrini Mission for their arrival, Gillooly and Kaplan took pictures of themselves with their gear and emailed it to them in hopes of warding off any expectations of a huge camera crew arriving to tell their critical story.
Gillooly is also the director/ producer of Leona’s Sister Gerri, a one hour documentary produced for the Independent Television Service. The film brought her national attention with an airing on PBS and winning numerous awards including a Bronze Apple from the National Educational Film & Video Festival.
