a river away

NEWS RELEASE 
For Immediate Distribution   
January 24, 2017
Contact: Shebana Coelho, cell 609-651-5840, 
e: [email protected]
 
 
A SANTA-FE BASED ORAL HISTORY DOCUMENTARY ABOUT LAND AND COMMUNITY IS JUST A RIVER AWAY FROM REACHING ITS CROWDFUNDING GOAL
 
The Indiegogo campaign for the New Mexico oral history documentary, Nasario remembers the Río Puerco is one week away from the end and $4000 away from reaching the amount needed to edit the film for broadcast consideration by New Mexico PBS. The production team is based in Santa Fe, recently ranked by Moviemaker magazine, as the “#2 small city to live and work as a filmmaker in North America.”
 
Nasario remembers the Río Puerco is a new documentary that follows celebrated folklorist Nasario García doing what he loves: wandering through landscape and memory amid the ghosts towns of New Mexico's Rio Puerco valley, reviving recuerdos of his youth when the ranching villages thrived and viejitos elders told stories beside a river that once ran.  

To see a trailer, read the story of the film, and contribute, visit the Indiegogo site
 http://bit.ly/NasarioFilm or the film’s website www.nasarioremembers.com  
 
Since December 14, the campaign has raised over $18,000 towards editing expenses.  
 
In this last week – and with about $4000 left to raise, the campaign is reminding audiences of several Perks for donation still up for grabs, notably:

• a guided trip with Dr. García to the ghost towns of the Rio Puerco valley, 
• signed editions of rare oral history books,   
• a $40 Be a Credit to us Perk, which gets your name in the credits of the finished film under a general title Crowdfunded By Communities Who Care About Land And Story. You also receive a digital vintage photo of Nasario García, dated from the 1940s in the ghost town of Guadalupe.
• creativity sessions with director Shebana Coelho and editorial consultations with editor Shelene Bridge
• tickets to the summer season of El Flamenco Santa Fe, with Antonio Granjero and Estafania Ramirez. 

The Hispanic villages of the Río Puerco valley, located near Cuba NM, and southeast of Chaco Canyon, thrived between the 1900s to the 1950s. Using interviews with Dr. García, oral histories, archival photos and evocative footage of the landscape, this hour-long film recalls the stillness and vividness of a tactile past, one that the landscape and the ruins still remember. The film is directed by Shebana Coelho, who previously adapted Dr. García’s first book of oral histories into the stage play, When The Stars Trembled in Río Puerco that was performed to full house audiences at Santa Fe’s Teatro Paraguas and Albuquerque’s National Hispanic Cultural Center in 2014.
 
“I imagine this film as an encounter about land and memory,” she says, “about home and belonging, and that mysterious feeling that has drawn people to New Mexico for ages – because the stories are alive on this land and when a storyteller arrives, and the listeners gather, the land offers up its own memories. Do ruins remember us? I believe they do.  And especially now, more than ever, I believe we need stories of diverse voices reconnecting us to community, story and spirit.”  
 
Coelho is an award-winning director and writer whose documentaries have been broadcast on PBS, Discovery Channel, and BBC Radio, among others.
 
The fiscal sponsor for the film is New Mexico Film Foundation, whose executive director is Dirk Norris. The film is presented by the multimedia oral history project, Recuerdos Vivos New Mexico/Living Memories. For more information, please visit www.nasarioremembers.com, Facebook @NasarioRemembers or email [email protected].