Download MINUSTAH and Soap Opera Production in Post

Case study: MINUSTAH and soap opera production in post-earthquake camps
From a production perspective, one of the most interesting communication projects carried out in
Haiti in 2010 was a soap opera produced by the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti
(MINUSTAH). The drama series, entitled ‘Under The Sky’, was designed to reflect life in camps while
weaving in messaging around issues such as registration, gender-based violence, child vulnerability,
post-earthquake traumatic distress and hygiene.
MINUSTAH had already contracted a local production company, Renaissance Films, before the
earthquake to produce programming on community violence, but after the disaster adapted the
project to address the question of information for survivors. The films were shown on specially
erected screens in the camps and on six Haitian television stations, with each episode costing around
US$6,000. Thematically, many of the ideas for issues and messages were solicited from international
organisations, primarily through Communications with Disaster Affected Communities (CDAC) Haiti.
Much of the story development, however, was done during the production process, by the
production team who was living in the camps at the time. Rather than follow a conventional model
of formally researching storylines, testing storylines in focus groups and carrying out surveys among
a target audience, the production team drew on the reality of camp life.
“We came up with characters together,” says director Jacques Roc. “We lived in the camp, we slept
in the camp. Every time we produced a show, I slept in the camp. That’s how we ensured it was
based on real life. We needed to talk to people, to walk around, to see how it was at night.” The
team benefited from being both Haitian and a local independent company contracted to MINUSTAH:
no international organisation would have allowed staff to spend a night in the camps. The team also
hired camp residents as extras. Based on camp experiences, the family at the centre of the soap
opera was clearly identified as middle class, to reflect the fact that the earthquake particularly
affected this sector of society.
The team also handled as much post production as possible on site. “We set up a stage in the camp
and did all the post production there. When we were producing at night people would come and
watch and would give us feedback all the time, on the spot. We would find that people wanted to
tell us their stories. One storyline came directly from that: we were in Champs de Mars camp and
one night we found there weren’t many people in front of the screens. I went and found them all
sitting up on the hillside in their tents. They said it was because people were cutting the tents to
steal from them so they didn’t want to leave. So we did a storyline about theft from tents.”
Filming in the camps was not always easy: sets flooded, mud made use of selected locations
impossible and in some cases the team encountered hostility for setting up free screens in places
where TV owners were charging people to watch broadcasts. Some aid agencies also worried that
setting up screens in camps would attract people to the settlements that agencies were trying to
close down.
One interesting consequence of this was that at times, the storylines and the real lives of camp
residents began to merge. “We had a rape story that went across three episodes and of course we
were filming in the camp. We showed the pain of the girl, what she went through, we did the whole
storyline in one place and people started to identify with her. When we filmed the scene where the
rapist was arrested, as the cops were handcuffing him they threw him on the ground – and the
whole crowd was cheering.” Serious issues were also addressed through comedy: asked by the
International Organisation for Migration (IOM) to tackle the problem of forged registration cards,
the team developed a storyline in which a character hatches a plot to buy and sell cards and is
thwarted by neighbours.
Although the production team talked to audiences after screenings to gauge reactions, there was no
formal monitoring or capture of the project. It is therefore difficult to judge how effective it was
nearly a year later. Audiences told international journalists at the time that they enjoyed the films,
but there is little surviving documentation of impact.