Story Frame 59 – My First Film: A Woman Named Hello

A Woman Named Hello was actually my second attempt at a film.

After establishing Asheville Productions as a legal entity, my first thought was to make a documentary about Moni Taylor and her moving b&w photography of the little babies who lived such brief lives.

I called it The Time Between in honor of those precious little between some babies’ births and their deaths and enlisted Leif to edit a trailer with Eva Cassidy’s poignant song, “Songbird” as the underlying music track which, to me, felt like a mother’s ode to her lost child.

For you, there’ll be no crying,

For you, the sun will be shining,

‘Cause I feel that when I’m with you, it’s alright,

I know it’s right.

And the songbirds keep singing like they know the score.

And I love you and I love you and I love you…

Like never before.

All these years later, it still gives me chills and makes me teary-eyed whenever I play it.

Despite many efforts over many months, I was unable to get a grant or pull together production funds. Which I guess was just as well because a few months after the feature I’d written for the Mountain XPress was published, Moni dropped a bombshell on me.

We were having coffee at the Dripolater in downtown Asheville when she told me she had applied and been accepted to serve in the Peace Corps.

In the midst of the happy morning buzz of coffee machines, chatter and chill music all around me at the Dripolator, I sat stunned and sad, the coffee in my cup turning cold as she told me all about her new adventure.

She’d been hoping to get stationed in Eastern Europe, she told me. But instead, she’d assigned to Malawi, a small country in Africa and one of the poorest in the world. Learning that Malawi was nicknamed ‘the warm heart of Africa,’ Moni turned it into an opportunity and embraced the idea of going there instead.

She was so excited, I tried to be happy for her. But I was also heartbroken to hear my first best friend in Asheville would soon be leaving to live and work on other side of the world.

As Zoë and Leif were growing up, I sometimes attempted to nurture in them the perspective that when disappointments and bad surprises happen, try to turn them around and see how they might be a new opportunity, if seen from a different angle.

Of course, it’s not always obvious and sometimes you have to work really hard to wrap your head around unexpected changes. I’m not always the best practitioner of my own advice, but somewhere the weeks after Moni gave me her news, I found a way to look at it as an opportunity.

Pivoting away from The Time Between, I asked Moni if I could instead document her journey from Appalachia to Africa – and she agreed.

The narrative thread would be that it’s one thing to join the Peace Corps in the early post-college years, before the responsibilities of a lifetime and family fall upon you. But what happens when you make a pledge to service at the age of 54, when the childbearing and raising years are behind you? What happens when you leave a life – everything and everyone you have ever known – and find yourself thousands of miles from home, in a culture that bears no resemblance to your own?

I particularly loved the idea that a nurse from Appalachia – an area which for so many decades has been associated with poverty and need – was shifting that old paradigm around by setting forth to help others out in the world.

I would document her journey to Africa, I proposed. And along the way, we would discover what would be demanded of her in return after she got there.

To my great relief, she agreed and we high-fived our new adventure.

Before moving to this new life in Africa, however, Moni decided to get a tattoo. It would be her first – and not just a little flower on her shoulder or a little zen mantra.

A devout Catholic, Moni had decided she wanted a full back piece – an image of the Virgin Mary holding a ribbon with the names of her four children in script on it.

“That way the Blessed Mother will always have my back,” she explained, smirking mischievously.

This was a huge commitment in terms of tattoos and pain. Go big or go home. I tagged along with her, photographing part of the process for the new documentary, watching her bite strands of her long gray-blonde hair, blinking back tears as Danny the tattoo artist inked the full color images across her backbone.

A few weeks later, I called up my old pal, cinematographer Richard Chisolm and he flew down from Baltimore to help me with the first few shoots around Asheville. Local cameraman Jason Scholder shot a Peace Corps meeting at the Dripolator with Dave Schmidt running sound. To create a fundraising trailer, I licensed footage from Zygimantas Cepaitis to cover the Malawi part and requested permission to use West African musician Baaba Maal’s “A Song for Women.”

Putting the kids to good use, Zoë worked as my associate producer on the shoots and then Leif edited another trailer for me. It still gives me chills – in a good way – to watch it.

At this point, however, nothing had really sprung to mind for the title of the documentary.

And then one day, over yet more cups of tea and coffee, Moni told me she was starting to learn some preliminary words in Chichewa, the primary language spoken in Malawi.

“And hey, how funny is this!?” she said. “My name in Chichewa means ‘hello and welcome.’”

“That’s it!” I said, smiling. “That’s the title of our film – A Woman Named Hello!”

After Moni left for Africa, I busied myself writing and sending out more grant proposals to fund production.

After that, unfortunately, nothing went quite to plan….

Coming up next … Story Frame 60 – The Music of Shakespeare

[You can still see the trailer Leif edited for A Woman Named Hello on my old website: https://kristinfellows.com/site5/portfolio/awomannamedhello.php]

[Photo of me with Jason Scholder on location at the Driopolator by Zoë McGrane]