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  Home Page » A&E » Filmmaker Aims To Raise Awareness With The Tijuana Project

Filmmaker aims to raise awareness with 'The Tijuana Project'

by Jon Rezabek
Herald Staff Writer The giant waste depositories outside of Tijuana, Baja California, may be a bit south of Southern California's movie-production studios, nevertheless, they are the backdrop for acclaimed local filmmaker John Sheedy and his associates' latest documentary, "The Tijuana Project."

Sheedy, the director, co-producer and cinematographer, got the idea from well-known author Victor Villaseñior while attending the San Diego Latino Film Festival a few years ago.

"I went down there, and the first incident I had with that place just blew me away. It was like Animas Mountain but out of garbage," Sheedy said.

The scene continued to make an impression on Sheedy.

"It was a real journey to go there every day and feel the ground shaking underneath me and these masses of seagulls competing for the food everywhere and workers competing for the recyclables," he said.

On the first day checking out the dump, Sheedy and his crew were informally adopted by a group of children who brought them back to their house, also made of garbage.

Deciding to work with children aged 9 to 12 for the film, Sheedy and crew found six children among the cousins and brothers and sisters of the family.

"Over the next year and a half we basically documented the story of a year in the life of these kids," he said.

"The Tijuana Project" turned out being concerned with myriad global issues such as health, waste management, education and drug abuse, he said.

The story is told through handheld cameras recording a the children's lives among the mounds of trash, he said.

However, the film also approaches the education and future of the children, he said.

"In the midst of all this chaos was a school that was opened by a guy from New York named David Lynch, who literally opened a school in the dump," he said.

Lynch's school is not the only element of hope.

Sheedy and his team decided to transcend traditional objective documentation and become philanthropists.

"In a sense, we were probably interfering by coming in and doing our jobs nonobjectively but, while documenting a social issue, why not get involved?" he said.

Sheedy and his team have raised money to bring workshops to Lynch's school and have vowed to create a trust fund for the children after the film's financial needs are complete.

"As the project progressed, we decided we wanted to step in a give something back to the community for being so open to us," he said. "What we're doing is taking any still photographs that sell or any donations that come in after the film is finished and putting them into a trust fund for these kids."

Sheedy also has been putting the still photography from the event in a show called "Children of the Dump Photography Show," including some shots taken by the children themselves.

"(The children) would be digging in my bag pulling out cameras. When you work with them for a year and a half, you ultimately build trust, so after two or three months it's like, you six kids have permission to use the cameras and you can use them for up to 24 hours," he said.

While privately showing a nearly finished version of the film as a fundraiser at 7 p.m. Sunday at The Abbey Theatre, Sheedy and team are planning to enter the film into a number of film festivals, including the Durango Independent Film Festival, in hopes of success.

Sheedy's previous film, 2005's "El Inmigrante," a film exploring national border issues and perspectives told primarily through the killing of Eusebio de Haro, a young Mexican native and brief American immigrant, caught approval in the circuit of film festivals into which it was entered.