Documenting culture

NEWPORT BEACH — In a drawer in the tiny office of Rockland Productions, Sarah Weiland keeps a notebook outlining the contents of 50 hours of film.

For two months over the last year, the Newport Beach resident took a camera from California to Bangladesh, filming an exchange program between high school students on different parts of the globe. Along the way, she saw some of the world’s most desperate poverty, then contrasted it with the sleek landscapes of Los Angeles and Orange County.

Now, with her experiences captured in a stack of tiny videocassettes, she sits day and night in an editing room and shapes them into 20 minutes’ worth of film.

“Watching this footage over again, every day I leave this office feeling like I was still in Bangladesh,” Weiland said. “It puts me back there. It’s really surreal.”

In mid-October, officials from Relief International, the Los Angeles-based nonprofit group that sponsored the student trip, plan to visit Weiland’s office to see her finished product. Once completed, the still-untitled movie could serve as a promotional video or a recruitment tool for the group’s future programs.

In the meantime, Weiland has been stationed at her computer, sifting through her tapes for the most poignant shots of Bangladesh, the most haunting faces of children. On Monday, her 13th straight day of editing, she sat in her office and screened the opening minutes of her first rough cut.

The film started with a montage of American and Bangladeshi students in front of a white wall relating their impressions of the other’s culture. Afterward, the camera panned through the grimy streets of Dhaka, the capital, where the Americans arrived by plane. Over the next 15 minutes, Weiland added shots of her comrades building a community center in Bangladesh, the Bangladeshis listing their favorite parts of U.S. culture, even both groups forming a conga line.

Parts of the film featured voice-over narration by students from both countries reading diary entries from their trips. At other points, the soundtrack was silent or incomplete. Next to Weiland’s computer was a stack of raw footage still to be edited, including scenes of the Bangladeshis visiting students at Corona del Mar High School, learning to bowl and at the YWCA taking their first swimming lesson.

Lucy Steinberg, the co-founder of Rockland Productions and camerawoman for some shots, said the footage added up to a clear message: that whatever their differences in culture and wealth, kids from the First World and the Third World had plenty in common.

“I think the idea is to show that people are people and take some of the stereotypes away from the situation,” she said. “In doing that, you eliminate some of the fear.”

Weiland, a Corona del Mar High School graduate and former Hollywood film editor, and Steinberg, a prominent Newport Beach philanthropist, co-founded Rockland Productions last year to film humanitarian documentaries around the world. The duo started by making a pair of short films about the Leadership Institute for Teens in Aliso Viejo. After submitting the short version of their Bangladesh film to Relief International, they hope to shop a longer version to festivals and TV stations.

In either version, Steinberg noted, the finished movie could serve as a cultural document.

“When you see the film, you’ve gotten to see through the eyes of some of these students their own wishes for the future,” she said.