Educational Media Reviews Online

The Peace Corps will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in 2011. This excellent, timely film documents the first-person reflections of about a dozen American men and women, including director and cinematographer Judy Irola, who trained in 1966 for two years of work on agricultural projects and in rural family health clinics as part of the first contingent of 65 volunteers in Niger, West Africa. Five of those interviewed had also just returned from a 2009 trip to Niger as a tourist group.

About half of the film consists of edited portions of the individual interviews Irola conducted in 2009 with her fellow volunteers and with two current Nigerian government ministers, who in 1966 had come to the US to work with the volunteers as trainers. Irola also provides voice-over narrated reflections on their collective experiences and the changes they witnessed in Niger, accompanied with pictures and film taken during their time as 1960’s volunteers and with film taken during the 2009 return visit. The film is particularly valuable for the way Irola allows each volunteer to thoughtfully reflect on his or her motives for volunteering, their experiences in Niger, and after their return to an America roiled by the turmoil of late ‘60s assassinations and social change. The film is well-paced and balances the interviews with beautiful and interesting film and pictures of the Nigerien people, villages and landscapes, and it also includes useful maps and animations to document the group’s travels in Niger.

Irola has had a long, productive career as a cinematographer with 17 feature films and 40 documentaries, including Cine Manifest (2006), which was a finalist for the SDFF29 Maysles Brothers Documentary Award. Niger ’66 reflects this filmmaking experience with its very professional editing and narrative pacing. The film will be very useful for stimulating high school or college classroom discussions about volunteerism and cross-cultural social issues, and it would be a welcome addition to college, university, or large public library film collections.

This reviewer was able to identify, but not view, just three other films that have documented aspects of the Peace Corps experience: a 1970 US Agency for International Development film, Don Tomas about Peace Corps work in Honduras; a 2006 film by Micah Schaffer, Death of Two Sons about the parallel lives of two young men--one from Guinea who moved to the United States and was killed by New York City police and the other, an American Peace Corps volunteer, who died in a car crash in Guinea while living with the family of the young man killed in New York; and a 2007 film Jimi Sir documenting one volunteer’s Peace Corps experiences in Nepal.

Highly Recommended