The tadjah procession on Big Hosay Night. Jr. Korom's project attracted the attention of local media. But the project's real challenge was the editing phase, which meant distilling a coherent 45-minute documentary film from 40 hours of raw footage. Between 1992 and 1998, while juggling his job as a curator at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, N.M., he made frequent trips to Los Angeles to edit the film with coproducer John Bishop. Although Korom is a prolific writer in his field, he was motivated to film the Trinidadian rituals so that he might reach an audience beyond academia.
Words just fall short.
And this project also allowed me to bring out my creative side. Born in Yugoslavia, Korom hopes to screen Hosay Trinidad during an annual Sarajevo film festival in the fall. At the Vitas event, he says, a Bosnian member of the audience told him she was moved to tears by the cross-cultural harmony depicted in his documentary. We wanted the images to speak for themselves.