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Playwright, filmmaker and AIDS activist Seraphina Richardson spearheads an AIDS benefit Sunday for African children. |
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Fighting AIDS one village at a time
Documentary filmmaker chronicles children’s plight in Africa
When 10-year-old Grace began singing to the camera, documentary filmmaker Seraphina Richardson lost it. That’s because Grace, who was found in a gutter when she was only two, lives in an orphanage where most children die before they are 15 years old. She — and countless others — are probably HIV-infected, though there is no way to test those kids.
“AIDS is not under control in the majority of the world. In a slum where most of the adults have died of AIDS and the children are left to starve in the streets, millions are infected and none are receiving any medication to alleviate pain or disease spread,” she says. “I have witnessed 6-year-olds sell themselves for food. It’s not uncommon. A majority of the street kids sniff glue and other solvents to stave off cold and hunger and are literally dying in the streets.”
Richardson, who lived in a slum outside of Nairobi but is spending the summer here in Provincetown, has organized a benefit concert and hopes to raise money to save those kids.
“A Night of Naughty Numbers,” featuring Miss Richfield 1981, Ryan Landry, Thirsty Burlington, Penny Champagne and Steamy Brown, among others, begins at 10 p.m. Sunday at The Crown and Anchor, 247 Commercial St., Provincetown. Tickets are $12, and all of the money raised will go directly to an organization made up of Richardson and four African men who have given up their comfortable lives to shelter and try to save these children.
“You spend money on a night out anyway. Why not do it for a good cause?” she says, adding that besides raising money for the children, she’s looking to find a way to fund her documentary about them. “The impact could be huge. … I really want to say something about it, and I think film is the best way to do it.”
Richardson, also a playwright, first went to Africa five years ago, where she traveled and volunteered to do AIDS work.
“I was just struck by the kids who were born innocent,” the 28-year-old filmmaker says. “I know too much to pretend it doesn’t exist.”
So Richardson got a camera and began shooting footage for a film in Kenya last year. Clips from this documentary-in-progress, which means to expose the truth behind the origin of AIDS, will show during the benefit concert Sunday.
“[This] disease cannot feasibly discriminate against gays and blacks without a little assistance,” she says.
Richardson says that the more she started talking to people, the more she began to believe in a conspiracy theory — it seems that a hepatitis B vaccine aimed at gay men and a polio vaccine for Africans coincided with the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.
At the age of 15, Richardson dropped out of high school and started traveling. She’s since been to 35 countries, received her GED, graduated from college, and earned her master’s degree in playwriting from Smith College. She has had eight of her plays professionally produced, including a play about homosexual hate crimes and pharmaceutical companies, she says.
“So then I just kept having a political bug up my ass,” she says. “Now I think I’m done with that [playwriting] phase.”
Richardson first came to Provincetown while finishing her master’s degree, because she needed some ocean footage. She met Ryan Landry while doing “Showgirls” last year, and this year he encouraged her to return because he had a part for her as the fairy godmother in his new show “Cinderella Rocks.”
Richardson says she can’t decide whether to work toward a Ph.D. in international development at Columbia University in the fall, or join the Peace Corps. Either way, she’s going to keep working on that documentary, even if living in a hut in the African desert and watching kids suffer and die isn’t an uplifting experience.
“Ten times a day I almost lose it. I feel like nothing else is fulfilling,” Richardson says. “I keep thinking that it matters to this one village right now.”
But don’t tell her she’s doing anything special.
“I don’t feel like I’m doing anything special. I’m just doing my part,” she says.
awood@provincetownbanner.com
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In the Arts
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Jul 14th, 2005