Students in the Digital Arts Technology Academy attended a screening of the documentary "Angels in the Dust" Tuesday morning at the Palm Springs High School theater. The film is about Marion Cloete who abandons a life of privilege in Johannesburg to build Botshabelo, a village and school that provides orphaned children with shelter, food and education.
"The film made me reevualuate my health, my life and my family," said DATA senior Jessica Gerrell.
"It made made me realize that there are still good people out there devoting their lives to helping others," said DATA junior Paola Fernandez.
"I admire the Cloete family because they took their entire savings and built an orphange because not a lot of people would take everything they own and put it into an orphanagge to help children who are victims of AIDS," said DATA senior Jennifer Juarez.
James Egan is the Producer of the documentary.
Neely Tucker of the Washington Post wrote this about the documentary: "...you will be moved, if not stunned, by this straightforward, unadorned example of filmmaking. Director Louise Hogarth uses no voice-over narration, no real narrative device to move the story along. She just turned on the camera in 2004 and spent a large chunk of the next two years following Cloete on her duties, which range from playing with children to loading bodies in the mortuary into coffins and then into the back of a pickup."
Following the screening, Katherine Sanchez and Yoryely Rojas, two students in Matt Hamilton's digital storytelling class at Cathedral City High School, sat down with Hogarth to talk about her documentary.
Hogarth told the students that the film had a such a strong impact on her life that she started the orphan bracelet campaign, which is called DO Ubuntu, which means do unto others as you would have them do unto you. She employes women in South Africa who are living with HIV to make the bracelets. The profits go to a program that feeds 200 South African children every day, as well as capital projects, which recently included building a house in Uganda and a wing on an orphanage.
"Before making the documentary, I was very aware of the HIV problem in Africa and I wanted to make the rest of the world aware of it," said Hogarth. "At that point in time, South Africa wasn't able to get any HIV drugs because the president of Africa didn't believe HIV caused AIDS, so I was hoping this documentary would help to rectify that situation and put a spotlight on that situation and encourage people to help in any way they could."
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