The preservation of culture that occurs within a community garden.
It was important for me to validate the struggles and accomplishments of my grandparents while at the same time expressing the appreciation towards the kind gentle people that I had met at the community garden. I wanted to show that sometimes the most wonderful and interesting knowledge can come from the people we least expect. Here in the city planting and growing food has a bad or backwards image. If you do that kind of work you are backwards, a peasant, but people do not realize the tremendous effort, skill and knowledge needed for this type of work and how valuable the people that have these skills are. Getting that across was my main objective. I knew what my grandparents did for a living and how they had raised all their kids by farming, but I did not realize just how important it is until I stated attending and learning at the community garden.
The broader perspective can be that intelligent, strong role models or heroes may be closer than you imagine. The global perspective can be seen as getting back to our roots and going green. In a time where everyone seems to be making energy efficient this and environmentally friendly that, starting a garden is one of the best things that you could do for the environment, not to mention your health.
One of the things that I wanted to convey was communication between grandparents and even older relatives and community members. In the present, we are bombarded with technology and the feeling that anything old is obsolete. My film could be used to show younger audiences that a good healthy relationship with grandparents or older people in their lives can be more interesting than we give them credit for. We can learn so much from such role models all it takes is a little patience sometimes and a little effort from your part.
Over all I believe that this type of new media story telling can be used to bring social justice issues to light. This would be a great way to expose problems because it would inspire people to do something about those issues even if they live in a totally different country. It could also be used to for testimonials and, as I mentioned earlier, family histories so that future generations have the opportunity to learn about their families even if there is no one there to tell the story. The message I would pass on to others would be to open their minds and hearts as they embark in this journey.