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Director's Notes

I had been living for three years in Kenya working as an English teacher and educational media consultant for the Ford Foundation, CARE International and USAID. There I developed a series of plays on teenage pregnancy and AIDS that toured the country and were broadcast on Kenyan radio and television.

Ever since, I have wanted to return to Africa to produce a film about young people. I knew that the anti-apartheid movement was an international link for young people around the world, and I wanted to explore the cross-cultural implications of youth activism. However, I had no clue as to how to make a documentary film.

I heard about an incredible graduate program at UCLA that combined Anthropological studies and area studies with film, so I obtained an M.A. in African Area Studies and an M.F.A. in film production from UCLA. I worked as a research assistant at the James Coleman African Studies Center there, under Sheilah Clarke-Ekong, who helped me write grants, and we eventually landed the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in International Peace and Cooperation, and a SONY/Streisand Fellowship, an initiative of Barbra Streisand, to support emerging women filmmakers. For UNCOMMON GROUND, I also received grants from the American Film Institute for Independent Film and Video, the California Council for the Humanities, Eastman Kodak Product grant, and the Los Angeles Arts Recovery Fund.

I then set about identifying young people in Los Angeles who could make the trip to South Africa, and found out about the Los Angeles Student Coalition, who regularly held demonstrations in front of the Beverly Hills-based South African Consulate. There I met Kamau, Joann, and Martin, who eventually introduced me to the others, and we were on our way. We wrote numerous letters to find hosts, and were blessed to be invited by the cultural arm of the ANC through Kenneth Mdana, in Grahamstown, South Africa. The film is about all our journeys, at a time when both South Africa and Los Angeles were going through monumental changes, and at a personal crossroads for the kids, who were all graduating from high school that year.