On April 8th, Silent Snow had its US premiere at the Tallahassee Film festival in Florida and on the 10th it was also shown in Key West at the famous Tropic Cinema. I was invited to stay at the beautiful house of John Padget, together with Jacob Gelt Dekker, executive producer and supporter of Silent Snow...

The European premiere of Silent Snow (the feature length documentary) was a great success! On March 27, we had our first European screening at the Movies that Matter festival in The Hague. Many members of the cast and crew were present to celebrate this memorable day, among them polar explorer Ole Jorgen Hammeken; co-author and main character in the film Pipaluk Knudsen-Ostermann, and famous cameraman from India, Viraj Singh.

It was quite an adventure: showing an unfinished version of Silent Snow to the UN....

Arriving to San José was amazing – it was so green and beautiful with the volcanoes.

I tried to stay awake, fighting the jetlag. We went out for dinner, to a place on a hill – the view reminded me of the view in Kampala. This trip to Costa Rica was to wrap up Silent Snow, I had seen so much and was excited to see which impression this country would make on me.

It seemed as though that the people of Costa Rica had set a certain precedence that one has to follow while ones time there. Jan had said something about Costa Rica having one of the highest happiness quotents in the world. This was truly an example of how true this statement was.

We had slept in the most beautiful house I've ever seen, in the middle of a rainforest, surrounded by huge trees. Joep Merkx, a Dutch friend had built it on a little place where he didn't have to cut any trees. There was no electricity. At night candles gave a fairytale light. At 4 o’clock monkeys started a kind of loud barking, very close. 

While Bart, Boris and Stella work on a fine edit of the first 75 minutes for the IDFA selection in Holland, we start from this house in the jungle for the last scenes in Costa Rica. We´ll travel to the Br Bri Indians who succeeded to fight malaria without the use of DDT. But new dangers are ahead. Far away upstream people want to start gold mining, and mercury will  threaten their unspoiled environment. Photo by Amanda Merkx   

Last weekend at the Dutch Environmental Film Festival Strawberry Earth Silent Snow proved to be one of the greenest film projects: we filmed all over the world with local crews, we found a great editor in our city of Utrecht, Boris Everts, who's coming on bike to edit at drsFILM headquarters and we decided to postpone the world premiere from September in Toronto to later this year in Amsterdam, where it's easy to invite people from the countries who helped us during the film making. Photo by Tiina Itkonen.

After a few days in Terrat it was time to return home. Again I had a stopover in Nairobi, here I slept in a hostel at the airport. I had a talk with the caretaker. His reaction when he heard where I was from still makes me laugh! He replied ”I am so sorry”, referring to the coldness of my country :-)