Last week I got a message on CouchSurfing from a person named Brook Silva.  Because I had already agreed to host another surfer, I arranged to meet for drinks.  When I arrived at the hostel he was staying at I confirmed my suspicion.  This man is indeed Brook Silva-Braga.  Creator of one of my new favorite movies, A Map for Saturday.  His movie–actually, it’s a documentary–is the story of him quitting his job and backpacking around the world for a year.

In case you haven’t noticed yet I have a huge passion for travel.  Unsurprisingly, I immediately fell in love with his work and I can’t say enough good things about it.  I think my colleagues here might be getting sick of hearing about it from me all the time.  As you can probably imagine I was really excited to meet him (OK, I admit it, I was a little star-struck) and I had a great time sharing beers with him and his girlfriend, Jill, as I got the opportunity to ask him about all of his adventures.  In particular, we talked about his latest documentary, One Day in Africa.  For five months Brook traveled around Africa filming his latest work.  While there he found six different people, from all different walks of life, whom he followed around for one day.  I am really looking forward to checking it out.

I think my favorite quote of the night was from Brook: “I hate it when people think that Africa is where the black people are.”  Of course, I’m more or less paraphrasing here as we did have a long, hard night of drinking.  My memory may be (read: definitely) a bit hazy.  At the very least I missed my Chinese lessons the next day; I’m sure you can imagine why.  Oh well.  I think a chance to meet the director of one of my favorite films is well worth the loss.

I highly recommend checking out both A Map for Saturday and One Day in Africa if you get the chance.  Also, here is a great review of A Map for Saturday, the very one that lead me to watch the movie in the first place.

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