The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [72]
During the editing process, we relived every moment of our experience. It was like watching a backward roller-coaster ride built with twists and turns that triggered fiery flames. It made us yearn to be back with our Sri Lankan children. When they appeared on the computer screen, I would touch it and smile. The biggest shock, however, came when the tapes were translated. We had no idea what the villagers had been saying at the time. Now we found out that while some of it was beautiful, other parts were unbelievably malicious.
After slaving away fourteen hours a day for a year, interspersed with a few short trips back to Sri Lanka in between, the documentary was finally complete. We called it The Third Wave, the nickname for all the volunteers and aid workers who came to help after the first two tsunami waves had destroyed the village.
The film opened in April 2007 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York to standing ovations and five sold-out screenings. We had finished it only a few days before the festival, so we hadn’t had any time to get excited about the big night. Hearing those first and second standing ovations, which went on for over fifteen minutes, was embarrassing and shocking to me. I felt humbled, remembering my suffering tsunami friends. I hoped that many people would see the film, bringing in more aid and volunteers.
The film toured the world after that, with screenings in Sydney, Tokyo, Iran, Monaco, Toronto, Denver, Los Angeles, the United Nations, and all over Asia and the United States. Every time Oscar and I appeared, the question-and-answer sessions went on for hours, and we were thrilled to find people genuinely intrigued about what really went on over there and how they could get involved in volunteering.
In January 2008, while I was on a trip to Hawaii to visit the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, I received a call from an unknown number. A male voice said he was Sean Penn, the actor, and that he had just watched The Third Wave. He loved our film and wanted to help spread the message of volunteerism. I looked into the phone when I realized that it really was Sean Penn’s voice on the line. After recovering from my state of shock, I listened to what he had to say. He was going to be president of the Cannes Film Festival that year and asked if he could take our documentary there to show to the world. I told him that sounded like a bloody great plan and rushed upstairs to tell Oscar, who was in bed with walking pneumonia. When I entered his hotel room, by coincidence Oscar was watching the Sean Penn movie I Am Sam on television. I said, “Let me tell you about this bloody great plan.…”
While preparing The Third Wave documentary for the upcoming Cannes Film Festival, I received another call from Sean Penn, who had another bloody good idea. He wanted to take a busload of people across the country, volunteering along the way. We laughed about its being a Partridge Family–style bus, where he was Reuben Kincaid and I was Danny Partridge. I hung up the phone excited, thinking it might happen later in the year, and continued with my work on the film.
Ten days later, Sean called to tell me the volunteer bus trip was on—in five days’ time. He asked if Oscar and I would come help, and also requested that we videotape the journey. Five days isn’t a lot of time to drop Cannes preparations and go on a road trip across America, but my instincts told me to go.
After meeting Sean at Coachella, a three-day annual music festival held near Palm Springs, California, we spent two weeks driving across the country with more than two hundred people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, camping out at night and volunteering