01:00 AM EST on Sunday, January 22, 2006

BY MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer

PROVIDENCE -- Even though Claire Andrade-Watkins left her Fox Point neighborhood more than three decades ago to attend Simmons College in Boston, she never really left.

Now a professor at Boston's Emerson College, she often visits old friends and relatives who are still in Providence, even though the Fox Point she knew in the mid 1950s and 1960s no longer exists and many of her Cape Verdean neighbors have scattered to other locations.

A big swatch of Fox Point was bulldozed at the end of the 1960s to make way for Route 195. Urban renewal and gentrification changed much of the rest. The site of the house she grew up in, on Planet Street, is now a patch of grass. The house of a good friend on Wickenden Street is now the trendy Coffee Exchange. The garage the neighborhood kids used to hang around is now the Cable Car Cinema & Cafe.

But home is still where the heart is, and for the past several years Andrade-Watkins has been piecing together a movie about the vibrant Cape Verdean community that was once a bedrock of Fox Point. The amusingly titled Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican? will have five screenings between Thursday and Feb. 1 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

For her first feature-length documentary, a loving, wistful look back at the people of the Fox Point that was, Andrade-Watkins interviewed many members and descendants of the families who came to Providence and New Bedford to escape the drought-stricken islands of Cape Verde off the coast of Africa in the 1940s. She restored color home movies donated by old friends. She shot footage at community social events.

She resurrected a Cape Verdean band whose members played to packed dance floors 40 years ago. She combed through newspaper articles for information about Fox Point. She went back to Cape Verde itself to shoot background scenes.

"I wanted to do this since I was an undergrad back in '70," says Andrade-Watkins, who majored in Afro-American history at Simmons and did her Ph.D. work in African studies at Boston University. "Largely, the direction in African studies was to find out more about Cape Verde.

"In everything I read, I was looking for some references to Cape Verdeans and just found so little," she adds between sips of hot tea with lemon in a quiet corner booth of a Thayer Street restaurant, the soft strains of lilting Greek folk music from a loudspeaker over her head serving as a kind of low-key Mediterranean soundtrack.

"I'm a daughter of Fox Point," she says matter-of-factly. Yet, dressed all in black with a little black sailor-style hat perched on her head, she looks more Fifth Avenue than Wickenden Street.

When her interest in Cape Verde culture began, she had never been to the islands her parents migrated from. But she lived there for a time as a 1995-96 Fulbright Scholar and now "goes back and forth as often as I can. I've made it a priority to become comfortable in both worlds, so it's not a romanticized, idealized version of the Old Country. It does have warts. I've seen them."

'Slipping away'

She made a half-hour film about the 1983 visit of Cape Verde President Aristides Pereira's first visit to the United States shortly after the islands gained independence from Portugal. It took her "an interminable amount of time to raise funds" for that documentary, which was broadcast on PBS in 1986.

Her impetus to push for a feature film about the local Cape Verdean community, however, came when she realized that many of the elders of Fox Point "were slipping away, and I was desperate to start."

She received a $5,000 pre-production grant and proceeded to do an archival interview with her godmother in 1995. That was the beginning.

Before long, she was collecting old pictures of the old Fox Point neighborhood as it existed in the '50s and '60s from friends, "over 700 photographs, doing research like Sherlock Holmes. I got a grant from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities," which had also funded her first film about President Pereira, "and used it to restore the old home movies."

For several years, it was very much a start-stop-start-stop project that she worked on while at Emerson, where she has taught for 23 years, "the first black academic tenured professor in the history of the school."

One of her classes -- "business concepts in modern media" -- teaches young filmmakers how to write grants, market and distribute their work and "basically how to be an aggressive, pro-active agent in your own creative product," which is exactly how she has approached film herself.

(There's also a class in post-colonial cinema, "with a specialty on French-speaking and Portuguese African cinema. I've written extensively on both of those.")

Shoestring budget

For Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican?, which at the time didn't have a title, "Basically what I would do is get a grant, shoot, stop and raise more money, get grants, shoot, stop, raise more money, raise my daughter, get divorced, get tenure, stop, write grants, get more money, go into debt."

Cobbling together funds over the years, she says that in the end her film "is easily a $600,000 project and I've done it with . . . mmm, it must be . . . a sixth of that."

Friends rallied behind her. There was a fund-raiser dinner-dance at the Venus de Milo in Swansea. Raffle tickets were sold at a Cape Verdean club. She launched a letter-writing campaign to old friends who had attended the Lincoln School with her. "We did everything but a cookie sale."

In the middle of working on her film, she hit a near disaster in 2003. The borrowed computer-based Avid film editing machine she had been using to store footage crashed "and I lost everything, almost eight years worth of media. I had to re-digitize everything. So I rented an Avid and put it in my bedroom."

The crisis slowed her progress. But she looks back now and says that although if things had gone smoothly "it might have been finished earlier; it wouldn't have been the same story. This is the story it needed to be. The story started speaking to me. This is the story of Fox Point."

With renewed enthusiasm she set to work and even discovered her title, Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican? She says it's a phrase that came from her ex-husband, who was originally from Pittsburgh.

They had met while attending school in Boston. He had never met anyone of Cape Verdean descent before. So he phoned his brother, who had just arrived in Providence on a scholarship to Brown University, and asked if he knew of the Cape Verdean community in nearby Fox Point.

The brother told him that there were a lot of Cape Verdeans around Providence, but he thought they were "some kind of funny Porto Ricans." The term stuck, and when Andrade-Watkins later met her future in-laws, she discovered that they'd been told she was "some sort of immigrant."

Validation

Before her film was to be shown as a work in progress at the African Film Festival at the Cable Car Cinema last April, Andrade-Watkins felt she needed some encouragement from the people who were actually in her film and knew the Point.

So last March she invited some of her aunts and uncles to her Brookline condo to take a look. "I had to have them validate it, or I couldn't have finished the work," she says.

"A big Cadillac pulled up in front with two sets of aunts and uncles. They sat in my 'screening room' in my 'corporate headquarters,' which is like six feet from my bed, and they sat and watched for 97 minutes without saying a word."

She was a nervous wreck as the film went on and they didn't respond. But at the end, one of her uncles turned to her and said in his Fox Point accent, "You don't have to do one more 'tang.' You got it right."

It got even better.

"I had made lunch for everybody, and it was the first time I'd cooked for my aunts and uncles. And Uncle Charlie sat down and was eating and said, 'You're the best cook in the second generation.'

"Well, I didn't need one more thing. Between the movie and the food: validated Cape Verdean woman."

When her aunts and uncles told her she had gotten it right, "it gave me the wind under my sails to take it to the wider community." She approached the work-in-progress screening at the Cable Car Cinema with eager anticipation.

Suddenly, she recalls, the word was on the street everywhere. The two shows at the Cable Car sold out and were well received by an audience that included many of the people who were on screen. At the end of the film, her daughter Callie, a recent Harvard graduate, sang a traditional Cape Verdean song that had many in tears.

Premiere in Boston

Yet her film, after being trimmed down to an 83-minute running time, is having its premiere in Boston, not Providence. Buses are being rented to take some of the elderly Fox Pointers to two of the screenings.

"I have a long history with Bo Smith, the curator at the MFA. And he's giving the film five screenings, which is unprecedented," Andrade-Watkins begins, before adding that she hasn't had any success in getting Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican? screened at either the Avon or the Cable Car, which is just around the corner from where she grew up and where it was screened nearly a year ago as a work in progress.

She's still trying and, who knows, may succeed. "I'm tenacious, not stubborn, I like to think," she says of herself.

Yet, reached by phone at the Cable Car, where he is the manager, Eric Bilodeau said that although her film got a good reception "and people were really moved," he doesn't want to deal with Andrade-Watkins again.

"I couldn't work with her. She kept coming up with new things that bothered her.

"Forty-five minutes before the show, she decided that the video projection just wasn't working for her and she wanted 10 color television sets brought in and hooked up immediately. Then she said that she wanted microphones and amplifiers so she could talk to the audience. This was less than an hour before show time!

"I refused to talk to her. It's only because Brown University was the middleman (as sponsor of the African Film Festival) that I didn't cancel the film."

Reached by phone to comment on Bilodeau's remarks, Andrade-Watkins recalls the Cable Car screening in glowing terms. "I had a wonderful time and have vastly different perceptions of what went on. I only met Eric that day, and he was not pleasant."

She added that most of her dealings were with Richard Manning, who had set up the festival, and that there was some problem with the way the projector image was thrown onto the screen. "Any professional filmmaker would be concerned about the projection throw and the other equipment, especially with a work in progress, so you don't look like a jerk. I certainly wasn't a diva."

Undaunted, Andrade-Watkins -- who is already planning to put together Part II of Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican? to continue it beyond 1970, where the first one ends, and carry it to the present -- refuses to give up.

"It needs to be here," she says. "This is so much a part of the history of Rhode Island and Providence."

Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican? will be screened at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, noon Saturday, 3:45 p.m. Jan. 29 and 8:30 p.m. Feb. 1. Tickets are $9 general admission; $8 for MFA members, seniors and students.

For reservations, phone (617) 369-3306.

mjanuson@projo.com / (401) 277-7276