Life In The Fast Lane

Getting into the field to film documentaries in faraway, unknown lands can be dangerous, especially for one who knows little about the language or culture of the place.

But fear, for Amie, comes mainly from the unknown - the feeling that anything can happen anytime.

Even for this gungho lady who admits to throwing herself into dangerous situations when she was younger, one could sense her underlying fear when she says, "In documentary, there is a fine line between when to turn off the camera and when to keep filming."

That she has, despite some harrowing experiences.

While in South Africa filming for Uncommon Ground (the film won numerous awards, including the International Documentary Association Award and Best Documentary in the Cork Film Festival to name a few), an apartheid film about a group of Los Angeles high-school students who travel to South Africa to meet and live with South African students in a black township, she was accosted by an angry man with an axe.

"There was a lot of hatred towards the whites at that moment and a truck driver was nearly beaten to death earlier. Then this man came at us with an axe. I was driving the car and my partner was filming.

"He said, 'Turn around.' I didn't and kept going. I drove right past him and we filmed for another 20 minutes. It was very scary but very memorable."

In another incident in South Africa, she went to a graveyard to visit the grave of a very famous South African hero and got hostile stares when her camera started rolling.

"We arrived at the graveside and there were people digging graves. And I felt like an apartheid tourist who should respect the fact that they were about to bury someone else who most likely died because of apartheid.

"The gravediggers just stopped digging and looked at us. We were a group of obviously Americans piling out of a really expensive van with camera equipment. It was very odd to try and figure whether or not to turn the camera off."

She says laughingly, "But, of course, I kept filming! You have to be irreverent about life and respect life as well. "

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