A Choice I Made

A Choice I Made, a film about a group of Peace Corps volunteers in India, will surprise you. Made in the cinema-verite style developed by advanced European film-makers and by the National Film Board of Canada, A Choice I Made is one of the most exciting and beautiful films to play in Cambridge this year.

As the Peace Corps begins its sixth year, its directors have apparently decided that a major shift in orientation will be needed to accomplish its aim of fermenting democratic revolutions. Rather than let the Peace Corps degenerate into an export model of the 4-H club, they are aiming at wholesale transformations of the communities in which they work. Simple idealism could never attract the kind of manpower they need. Their project requires an entire philosophy of life, a philosophy based on practicality and the value of direct experience. A Choice I Made embodies that philosophy, and at the same time, the highly sophisticated technique of the film insures that the finer points of that philosophy will reach the audience.

The film follows the volunteers as they go about their daily tasks in a small Indian village. A hand-held camera provides several engaging scenes of candid shots as the volunteers teach school, help develop a poultry farm, or assist at a village clinic. The camera fixes on the volunteers' faces as they struggle to communicate the meaning of Gulliver's Travels, then shifts to the faces of the young Indians, intent, curious, and often amused.

In the most basic cinema-verite tradition, A Choice I Made tries to put the viewer behind the volunteer's eyes to experience what they are experiencing. For example, we are treated to a motorcycle ride at 40 m.p.h. down the village mainstreet, dodging all kinds of carts and cows, as a volunteer poultry farmer brings his eggs to market. We walk along with another volunteer as he goes into the village to do his daily errands in the late afternoon, stopping with him to greet his friends and students.

The sound track of the film, consisting mainly of candid tape-recordings and snippets from interviews, reflects the same kind of directness. Some volunteers speak of their failures and frustrations, of their frequent inability to produce the slightest dent on traditional village life. Others have a more optimistic tale. Above all, one receives a sense of complete candor, of an attempt portray the actuality of Peace Corps life in India.

And beyond that, the camera discovers so many details of the experience of being in India that the film quickly rises above mere propaganda and becomes a fascinating piece of social documentary. The confrontation of an ancient society with the representatives of modern American life is captured permanently on the screen. A Choice I Made is a social document of first-magnitude. It is also a superb film.