Central Creatives: Lee Fritz and Jenna Morse on the Solar Women of Totogalpa
NOTE: Today we launch a new series: “Central Creatives”—Wednesday posts featuring artists who create projects in and around Costa Rica! We hope you find their work as exciting as we do. Kicking it off are Lee Fritz and Jenna Morse, whose incredible short documentary Adelante Con El Sol: The Solar Women of Totogalpa was an Official Selection at the 2013 PovertyCure Film Festival and inspired this new column.
Names: Lee Fritz & Jenna Morse
Where do you live: New Orleans, LA
What is your main artistic practice? We run a small full-service film production company out of New Orleans and do a little bit of everything: shooting and editing our own projects- We also dabble in many genres from commercials and music videos to documentaries and narrative.
Tell us about a project that brought you to Central America:
Adelante Con El Sol: The Solar Women of Totogalpa is a short documentary we made about a group of women rural Nicaragua empowering themselves and their community through the use of solar technologies.
We first heard about the Solar Women through Lee’s dad, an engineer at Cornell University who travels to the village of Sabana Grande every year and collaborates with the women on various solar oven designs. At the time we had just left New York City and were spending some time in Ithaca trying to figure out how to be the filmmakers we wanted to be and work on projects we felt inspired by but also have it be on our own terms. We had never made a proper documentary before but the story of these women and their work was compelling in many different ways; it had environmental sustainability, it had women’s empowerment in a male-dominated society, and it also had a community in the developing world lifting itself out of poverty. We only had a week in Nicaragua so we had to quickly figure out how we were going to tell the story. The shoot was nerveracking since this was the first thing we ever shot together and conducting interviews in another language was one of many hurdles to overcome. We had to iron out our roles fast and learn how to communicate with each other in this new way but once we got it down it was very exciting.
Where can we find your work?
All of our work is on our website as well as our vimeo page. However, the full length version of our documentary is only available on vimeo right now
http://calmdogproductions.com
https://vimeo.com/calmdog
What are you working on next?
We have several projects in the works. Besides our regular freelance work for clients around New Orleans we are collaborating with a friend on a narrative web series as well as writing our first feature together.
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