BOOK | DIRECTION | MONTAGE
The dream of the five-storey house – Four women in Honduras
Together with the camerawoman Fabiola Maldonado, graduate of the Film College in San Antonio de los Baños (Cuba), Anna Ditges lived for three months in the remoteness of the Tawahka village of Krausirpe, without running water, without electricity and without telecommunications. She operated her equipment with a self-built solar system, a particularly technical challenge at that time. Even during filming, she refined the rather vaguely ethnographic project down to the narrative core of the life experiences of four women of different ages. In the editing process, she condensed her comprehensive material into the 60-minute documentary film The dream of the five-storey house - Four women in Honduras, which she completed in 2001.
Documentary film | 2001 | 60 min | Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln
Anna Ditges had already become acquainted with the Honduran Mosquitia on a previous trip, which she had documented photographically.
Back then, when I experienced my first night in the Central American rainforest, I stayed in Krausirpe, a small village of the indigenous Tawahka tribe, located on the Río Patuca. That night, I was overwhelmed by the noise that rain can generate. It let its millions and millions of large and small drops patter on the leaf canopy and chased whole streams of water under the stilt house, for hours on end.
Just one year later, Hurricane Mitch swept over the village of Krausirpe and tore away most of the traditional Tawahka houses. The photographs taken in 1997 thus became a testimony to the still intact village life before the devastating environmental catastrophe, with which another piece of the indigenous tribe’s independence was lost. In 1999, Anna Ditges presented her images in the exhibition Krausirpe – A village on the Río Patuca at Kunsthaus Lempertz, through which she generated donations for the Tawahka.
Fabiola and I lived with Mirta, who welcomed us warmly. Every morning we were awakened by the thunderous sound of the logs Mirta was chopping with her machete on the kitchen floor. She made the coffee on the open fire. It was only when Mirta was away for a week that Fabiola and I realised how difficult it is to make a fire with damp wood, because we had forgotten all about drying the logs.
Photographs from the exhibition Krausirpe – A village on the Río Patuca
After a time, I felt the urgent desire to find out what had become of the village of Krausirpe and its inhabitants. I had the idea to return there – this time to make a film about the changing life of the Tawahka.
