LAVINIA CURRIER Cinematic Storyteller

“We all feel at some level at home in Africa. It’s where the human experiment began,” says director Lavinia Currier. Her remarkable new film, OKA!, is based on ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno’s memoir, Last Thoughts Before Vanishing from the Face of the Earth. Sarno traveled from New Jersey to Central Africa to record the music of the Bayaka Pygmies, the semi-nomadic people who traditionally survive in the forests of southwestern Central African Republic, northern Congo, and the western Congo River basin.

“I’m sure that in America there will be some issues like, ‘Why is a white woman talking about an experience of something so foreign to her,’” remarks Currier. “All I can say is that I hope the viewer sees how the relationship between people and nature can be intimate and joyful, that there was once a harmony with the environment, one that still exists.”

A Harvard alumna, Currier focuses solely on projects she wholeheartedly believes in. Before OKA!, she directed Passion in the Desert, which was released to critical acclaim in 1998, and was shot primarily in Jordan. “I had a brief stint as an actress and realized I had absolutely no talent,” she laughs as she recalls her beginnings. ”I always loved theater and film. In my 20s I went to Paris and fell in love with movies.” As to her taste in projects, she explains, “What attracts me to films that, in a sense, are more naïve, less perfectly sewed up, is that you can fill in the blanks from your own experience.”

Currier has just returned from another trip to Central Africa, where she went for a screening of OKA! “We first played it for the Bayaka Pygmies, with a little generator and a system we put together,” she relates. “Then we went to the local Bantu town and played it for the townspeople. Then we went to the capital to show it, and finally screened it for the president there.”

With admiration, Currier expresses, “The Bayaka Pygmies had nothing in terms of material possessions, nothing in terms of basic human rights, yet in every situation they found something to sing and laugh about. Their commitment to this film was the most extraordinary thing for me.”

Recounting the difficulties of working in a country with little infrastructure, she tells us, “The distance from the capital is 16 hours by car, there was no doctor for about six miles from where we shot, and I was afraid for the crew to be bitten by a deadly snake. The government officials interfered and stopped us from filming several times. There was an atmosphere of, ‘Are we going to be able to finish the film?’”

Yet through perseverance, they did, and the outcome is a must-see. Queried on the role of movies in our lives, Currier pauses for a moment, and says, “We have a fundamental need to tell stories. Storytelling helps us make sense of why we are on this planet and what is happening to us in time. Films are a very articulated and sophisticated version of that. Through films we tell the stories that need to be told.” 􀀀

OKA! opens in New York and Los Angeles on October 14th.