‘Just another nutty idea’

Roy McCord didn’t expect to end up in a film festival, or on Nicaraguan TV, when he started doing charity work in Nicaragua. But the Huntington Beach resident said he wanted to give locals in the town of Jinotega a chance to show off their culture and their talents.

His work for the organization Circulo de Amigas down in Nicaragua didn’t just produce one movie, but two — actually three, because “Jinotega Vibra: The Making of a Film Festival” is a film about a film. After putting together a glorified talent show on video that includes everyone from kids to famous authors to the town mayor, he went back and cut it into a documentary. That documentary will be shown Friday at Gone With the Film Festival in Fillmore.

The charity, founded in the 1980s by Huntington Beach teacher Pat McCully, supports about 120 girls and their families. Its community center in Jinotega has a clinic, a pharmacy, playground, library and even a night school for adults.

It started as something much more humble, McCully said. After going to Nicaragua a few times during the turbulent ’80s and seeing abject poverty, she said she had to do something.

“I set up a project the first time up in the mountains where they have no electricity or running water,” she said. “I taught 13 or 14 women to sew there,” she said, starting a decades-long quest to help their self-sufficiency.

McCord got involved in Circulo de Amigas several years back, taking a few trips to help out poor families.

He tells this story of one trip to help a family: “We put a concrete floor in their kitchen because that’s where the mother was making the family livelihood. The electricity was basically two bare wires with insulation stripped off. If you wanted light you would hang a bulb between them. So we replaced all of that.”

But in 2006 he decided to bring a video camera, “barely above home-video quality.” The result came off so well that he wanted to do something more ambitious: get a whole community, the Barrio Linda Vista Sur, to make a video showing off its cultural riches.

“Isn’t it marvelous?” McCully said. “It was just another nutty idea. It was so amazing to watch that come together. It was frenetic at the house. He took over the library totally and turned it into a studio.”

Soon enough word spread, and even the mayor of the town made an appearance.

“He came out to the barrio as a political thing and said, ‘Put me in the film,’” McCord said. “He danced for us, did cumbia-type stuff, and we filmed the whole thing. When his political associates saw it they put it on TV that night. Apparently it was a big hit all over town.”

The Friday showing is the first festival appearance of “Jinotega Vibra,” but McCord said he has entered it into a number of others as well. The film will play at 10 a.m. at the Historic Fillmore Towne Theatre, 338 Central Ave., Fillmore. For more information, go to www.irisfilmintl.com.