Favela documentary update

The way we’ve been feeling the last fifteen days can best be described as: desperate. And not in the funny Desperately Seeking Susan-way but in the Oh-My-God-Why-Is-This-Happening-To-Us-Hands-Held-In-The-Air-kind of way. Here’s what happened.
When we started editing we had two external hard disk drives on which we saved our material. Number One for Diogo and Dudu and Number Two for Mayra and Luis. So far so good. Last February, however, Number One decided to go to sleep and never wake up again. Luckily for us, our friend and computerwizard Allan managed to save all the data from Number One and put it on Number Two. Since it was already February and we ran way behind schedule and therefore had to economize on our budget, we decided to take the gamble and continue working with just Number Two. Big Mistake.
Two weeks ago Number Two wanted to be formatted. No matter what we tried or asked or begged of Number Two, it still wanted to be formatted. A Hard Disk Rescue Team was formed, computerbrains in Rio, Holland, Senegal and Colombia were consulted and a macumba was contemplated but still all of our data remains unseen. It’s gone. All our work from the past months down the drain.

We have survived many obstacles. It started with transferring a lot of money to the Belgian cameraman to buy cameras and a ticket to Rio to train the crew but who never showed up nor gave us our money back. Then we had the Kafka-scenario with a Carioca microphone store. Not to mention the crew, each individual as well as as a team, had innumerable personal dificulties, setbacks, mistakes and dissapointments to overcome while shooting the documentary. But we survived all these hurdles. And now this. Does it really have to be this hard? I mean, we are not trying to save the Amazon from deforestation or come up with the plan for peace in the Middle East. We just want to make a 60 minute documentary about the lives, hopes and dreams of four young inhabitants of Vila Cruzeiro.
“Consider the lost material as a pre-edit, it can only get better”, said Patricia’s friend Dana. We try. But it’s hard. We are still mourning the loss of the months of editing on sequences, endless puzzling on keeping or cutting the frame and then getting it just right, almost perfect, with exactly the rhythm you wanted. It hurts that those edits are missing in action.
We don’t know why this happened. We also don’t know how this could have happened. And we definetely have absolutely no more clues on how to solve our problem. But we do know this: even though it happened we are determined to finish what we started. The premiere in July, forget it. We’re guessing mid-October se Deus quiser. We’ll keep you posted. Keep your fingers x-ed, please. We are in desperate (there’s that word again) need of all the help we can get.