Constance Tillotson ’08 and Roxana Amini ’03 have never met, but the six degrees of separation between them are dwindling. Both were Cal State Northridge journalism majors. Both recently journeyed to the other side of the planet to help strangers grapple with issues of conflict and survival, and both used film to do it. What are the odds?

In March 2009, Tillotson blinked in surprise at an out-of-the-blue e-mail from the U.S. Embassy in Maldives. Aruni Peiris had found Tillotson online after an exhaustive search for the right American director to launch an embassy project.

As CEO of Sterling Studio, Tillotson guides and trains young actors in Hollywood. Her Los Angeles-based “On-The-Set” acting camp made her the perfect person to create two “drama camps:” one in Maldives for youths undergoing drug rehabilitation, and the other in Sri Lanka, for young people who had “grown up knowing only war and division within their country.”

By July, Tillotson and Peiris were on a government boat speeding over crystalline Indian Ocean waters that “made the Caribbean look polluted,” headed for Himmafushi Island, where hundreds of Maldivians battle drug addictions, most heroin-related.

Tillotson did not share their language or religion—the 48 men and two women pre-selected for the program were Muslim—but she was determined to “connect to [their] souls.” None had acted before, but Tillotson introduced them to improvisational exercises and within an hour, “our humor connected us.”

In a 10-day crash course, Tillotson taught them acting and screenplay structure. The eight screenplays they produced, shot two a day in close succession, were “beyond anything I could have dreamt,” said Tillotson, who was moved by the force and candor with which the amateur filmmakers transferred their emotions to the screen. “They’d been given new skills sets, and trust.”

In Sri Lanka, she worked with 12 to 16 year olds who never had met or even seen an American. They spoke different languages, so two interpreters were required, but by day two the walls had begun to tumble.

The Sri Lankan youngsters pitched themselves into every aspect of filmmaking, from acting, writing, directing and editing to shot set-up and camera work. “It was the most bonding experience,” Tillotson observed, recalling how children who could have been made enemies by the country’s protracted civil war instead found kinship through the creation of films.

Saluting her success, the embassy asked Tillotson—who also is national vice-chair of the Screen Actors Guild Conservatory and its director of young performers—to become its special cultural envoy. In April, she will return to Maldives and Sri Lanka to train 10 directors who will replicate the drama camps in different regions.

“I have an affinity for Africa,” said Roxana Amini. “There’s something magical about the continent.” But it was not just Africa’s beauty that drew her there. Underlying Amini’s middle class upbringing in El Toro was a sense of concern for social justice. Her Iranian-born parents “lived their lives knowing we were lucky to have freedom and the right to vote.”

In 2007, Amini went to work for OrphanAid Africa, teaching English to orphans in Agomeda, a Ghanaian village of 100 inhabitants, no electricity nor running water. Later, she visited hospitals and homes as a case worker in Togo—despite being mugged on her first night.

Still, each time she returned to Africa, she said, “they gave me more than I gave them. You look at life differently after being there.”

Her interest in international law whetted by her travels, she enrolled in law school at Chapman University, where she was accepted into a program whose mission was to develop documentaries on “worthwhile non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in different countries.” Africa had called Amini back again.

Her team decided to cover the plight of Cameroon’s indigenous communities—the so-called “Pygmies”—whose ancient hunting/gathering culture in the country’s shrinking equatorial rain forest is threatened by loggers.

As the team’s only member with journalistic training, she researched the incursions of the logging industry, which decimates the canopy, flora and fauna essential to “Pygmy” survival. The diminutive forest dwellers typically are forced into roadside villages where they suffer shameful discrimination at the hands of hostile Bantus, as taller Africans are called.

Throughout the Congo Basin, Amini said, “ ‘Pygmy’ communities are marginalized and overlooked. They have no rights in the eyes of the government. When the loggers come in to cut the forest, no one notifies the indigenous communities. They are simply shadows.”

“Shadows in the Forest,” the documentary produced by Amini and her colleagues, documents the work of NGOs such as the Centre for Environment and Development (CED) in helping the forest people push back.

A groundbreaking 1994 forestry law, for example, permits indigenous Cameroon populations to remain on their land if they can prove they actually live there. But the nomadic “Pygmies” move between hunting grounds as necessary, their settlements unrecorded on government maps. “Because these communities were not located on maps when the parks were established,” government economist Felix Sagne told a News from Africa writer, “the [Pygmies] were deprived of their right to the forest.”

In one memorable sequence, “Shadows in the Forest” films a NGO agent who took GPS units into the Cameroon rain forest to teach a community how to map its dwelling places. The unlettered but highly motivated “Pygmies” mastered the technology in half a day.

Amini is looking forward to film festivals and perhaps a PBS or Discovery Channel broadcast. “We saw what happened with the Native Americans,” she said. “You need to know where to draw the line.”

— Brenda Roberts

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