Alumna returns to screen documentary

Home Culture Alumna returns to screen documentary

Most college students know a lot about coffee, but Sarah (Howard) Gerber ’10 has them all beat.

Gerber, who graduated Hillsdale with degrees in both art and English, returned to campus Nov. 15 to screen her documentary film “The Way Back to Yarasquin.” The 35-minute film tells the story of Mayra Orellana-Powell, a Honduran native who owns Catracha Coffee. Her company buys coffee from farms in her homeland and imports the coffee to roast and sell in the Bay Area of California.

However, the path that led Gerber to Honduras’ coffee farms was not at all direct. When she first graduated, she was at a loss about how she wanted to use her majors in conjunction with a career.

“I wanted to find the best way to reconcile my love for creative endeavors with meaningful work that told real world stories,” Gerber said. “I wanted to understand the creative box I was working with so that I could best know how to push it.”

To this end, Gerber spent a year creating and studying what she described as her own “post-graduate degree in film.” She systematically set about educating herself about every aspect of the story-telling process, and expanded her photography business into a full production studio, Twenty Twenty Studios, in the process.

In Gerber’s mind, part of the natural conclusion of this course of study would involve producing a film completely on her own. When she met Orellana-Powell in 2011, that opportunity presented itself.

“I first met Mayra at a coffee festival I was taking pictures of,” Gerber said. “I saw how Mayra was using her resources to help her community, and I was fascinated.”

Orellana-Powell invited Gerber to accompany her on a two- week trip to the coffee farms, and Gerber accepted.

Gerber said that this decision led to the development of one of the most important aspects of her film: her relationship with Orellana-Powell.

“There is something incredible that happens when you travel internationally with another person: a kind of deep bonding,” Gerber said. “The relationship that I have with Mayra is absolutely fundamental to the story. We were able to connect and build trust, and the full story slowly began to reveal itself.”

Gerber discovered that Orellana-Powell was single-sourcing coffee: she was keeping each farm’s coffee beans completely separate, all the way from harvest to sale. This process is not common in the industry, and allows for the farmers to receive personal recognition for the work that they put into their crop.

“One of the most rewarding parts for the farmers is that they get to see their family names on the bags of coffee we sell,” Orellana-Powell said in the film.

Gerber said it was clear that the farmers are incredibly impacted by this gesture.

“It’s ultimately a lot more work and much more expensive to keep all the coffee seperate, but it was clear that they were just blown away that their names were on the bags,” she said.

In one scene in Gerber’s film, Orellana-Powell and several of her colleagues bring coffee to the farmers in Honduras and host a coffee sampling party where many of the farmers are able to sample their product for the very first time.

During the year that Gerber was making the film, Orellana-Powell’s company turned a profit of over $10,000, and Orellana-Powell decided to distribute the profits among her farmers. Gerber returned to Honduras with Orellana-Powell to capture the surprise and gratitude that the farmers expressed when they received their portion of the profits.

“The first time I went, it was exciting for them,” Gerber said, “but when I returned the second time, they knew I was serious.”

The farmers and families in Honduras were extremely excited when Gerber’s film premiered in California in August of this year.

“My main reward will be when I go back to Honduras in February of next year and get to show them the film,” Gerber said. “It’s going to be incredible.”

Maria Servold, assistant director of the Dow Journalism Program, was largely responsible for planning Gerber’s screening on campus. Servold graduated the same year as Gerber, and the two are close friends.

“I knew that that the idea of a movie about coffee would probably bring students in just because it’s two things they love,” Servold said. “It seemed like a very engaged audience.”

Micah Meadowcroft, a sophomore who interned at a documentary film studio this past summer, attended the screening which was held in the Hames Room at the Sage Center for the Arts. He said he was grateful for the chance to hear from a former Hillsdale student who has found success in the field.

“It was cool to see that there is a market for these kind of stories and that there is a market for an individual being creative,” Meadowcroft said.

For those who weren’t able to attend the screening, Gerber’s film is available to rent  online at Vimeo, and DVD copies will be available soon.

As she reflected on the process of making her film, Gerber said it definitely fulfilled her goal of learning a bit  about every aspect of filmmaking: she completed the film from beginning to end on her own.

The film has also opened doors for Gerber. She was approached by Royal, a coffee importing company, and asked to travel to every major coffee producing country in the world to produce short films about how the various cultures differ. She will set out on this trip next year.

In addition, Gerber is working on several other documentary projects ranging from a film about an extreme endurance athlete in Hawaii to one telling the story of a South Korean fashion designer.
Ultimately, however, Gerber said she hopes to continue to produce compelling content that pushes boundaries to tell stories in new ways.

“I want to move into other narrative films as well,” Gerber said. “Especially the ones that work in a more creative fictional approach to documentary making: a mix of the two. There is something in the way that we suspend reality when we view stories we perceive as fictional that we don’t do when we watch documentaries. So I want to use the power of that to tell true stories.”