Sephardi Voices
This semester, I started my internship for Sephardi Voices, a project that aims to give voice to the one million Jews from Islamic lands who were forced to leave their countries. The project involves interviewing them and putting these interviews into a database so that their stories can be shared worldwide. Working for the project was really exciting for me not only because it was my first experience doing an internship in Italy, but also because I found the project itself very interesting.
As I started working for Sephardi Voices, I got to learn more and more everyday about issues concerning Sephardic Jews. As I listened to their life stories through the interviews we filmed and edited, I personally came to a better understanding of their issues, of their lives and of the messages they wanted to transmit through these interviews. It was really interesting for me to see they wanted their stories to be told, as much as we wanted to tell them.
Before I moved to Rome to study in AUR two years ago, I had several internship opportunities back in Istanbul, Turkey. The one internship I feel like I’ve learned the most from was working in a film set, assisting the first and the second assistant directors. I did everything I could in both pre-production and production phases of the film, from small tasks such as bringing the coffee to the director, to bigger ones like taking the continuity list. However, even though I had many different tasks working there, I did not really feel like I was the one responsible for every single aspect of the film, since there was a huge crew I was working with and everyone was equally responsible for everything. Therefore, when I started working for Sephardi Voices with only two more colleagues to work together, I realized I did not really know much on the technical aspects of filmmaking, since in my other internships there were always other people taking care of it. I did not really know how to work with a professional camera, how to set up stands and lights, which type of lighting to use, etc.
This internship was a really good hands on practice for me to learn every single aspect of documentary film making, which I believe will be useful for my future career.