What a day! We had a very special workshop today, creating characters for the film. Those characters were the 'spirits of the estate'.

Ludo was leading the first part of the workshop, helping to make costumes and explaining to kids what character in the film was. We will need to work a little bit more on that, as just as we started filming kids became aware of other people (their family or friends) looking at them and they refused to wear masks... becoming someone else. Initially I felt a bit frustrated, we had equipment and camera operators organised... When I think about it now, there was something interesting in their refusal to were masks, to become 'the spirit of the estate'...or any other character that they had created. Younger kinds, when asked about who their character was, would reply that it was themselves. Musharraf made another Musharraf and etc...

I need to be careful of how much I want to push my own vision of the film... as it was always supposed to be the film made with... not about... if it is ever possible to avoid the 'about' aspect completely...

I think Ludo made an interesting observation saying that we need time to build characters, to make children understand that once they perform in the film they can become whoever they want... and that being a Devil in the film doesn't mean that Ashraff is a bad guy... (He created the Devil, but then was afraid to go outside in the mask, because he thought that other people will perceive him as someone bad)

The overall energy was great this time. A massive THANK YOU to Ludo, Federico, Annalisa and Andre, as each of them brought amazing energy with them. Federico was fantastic, explaining to kids how to make music...and they seemed to enjoy it a lot!

I wrote a text titled Blue is Blue, but Grey can be Blue too. Notes from the Leopold Estate. It was inspired by the Leopold Estate and people I have met here. The text, together with few photographs taken on the estate (by myself and by children), was recently published in Deja Vu magazine (www.theselection.net/zeitschrift).

Oh! and great news! Tomorrow is an engagement party of a son of my neighbours. I was invited and can't wait!!!! Everyone was running up and down the block with presents, sweets and flowers today...

Time seems to be flying, and so it is flying on our estate... I thought that our last party was just yesterday... and it was almost three months ago! We had various workshops since then...most of them focusing on small projects, where work was made immediately. Then, I went away for few weeks. Today we had another workshop. This one became a starting point for a short video that will be presented to the local community during the next party for the neighbours.

We are making masks...creating 'spirits of the estate'. These spirits will become 'alive' in a short video. Few of my friends became involve: Ludo and Andre as puppet experts, Annalisa as a camera operator.

It feels, that workshops became a generally accepted activity on our floor, which is great!

Here are some images from today: