Chris Ennis, ’84 knows firsthand how quickly everything can change.

When he graduated from film school in the 90′s Chris thought he would make a career in the movie business.  And then after working on movie sets for a couple of years, everything changed.  “Making movies is really monotonous.   You could be sitting in the same Starbucks shooting the same scenes over and over again for weeks,” Chris says.  “The hours are long, and it’s very isolating.”

Chris started shooting commercials and discovered he liked the pace and the people.

After several years in Los Angeles, Chris and his family returned to Boise in 2004.  He and his wife Suzanne now own a photography and videography company called NuVision Production .

Three years ago Chris was hired to take photographs at a Saint Alphonsus fundraising dinner for Project Haiti.  That night he had an opportunity to meet a charismatic and inspiring priest named Father Rick Frichette.  Father Rick and another Catholic Priest, Father William Wasson, Founded St. Damien Hospital and an orphanage named “Our Little Brothers and Sisters” in Port Au Prince to care for the many abandoned children who are dying from AIDS in Haiti. It is an island of hope in a sea of despair.

For months after their meeting Chris tried to convince Fr. Rick to allow him to come to St. Damien to make a documentary.  Fr. Rick refused, saying that he didn’t want the story to focus on him.  “But Father Rick is the story,” Chris says.  “The work that he is doing, the way that he has been able to adapt to the harsh realities of life in one of the poorest nations in the world and provide a sense of stability for those people…He is the story.”

And then, in 2010 everything changed.

The earthquake that devastated Haiti spared no one.  Fr. Rick realized that people in the US and abroad needed to know about St. Damien and the orphanage so that they could help.  Chris was finally invited to come to Haiti and make his documentary.

“I spent one week in Haiti, eight months after the earthquake.  It was an overwhelming experience.  The number of sick kids, the desperation and poverty…it took so long to digest it all even after I came back.”

“Thursday is the day I remember the most,” Chris said with a grimace.  “I’ll never forget the Day of the Dead.”  At St. Damien’s a funeral Mass is said every Thursday morning for the children who die that week.  Afterward paper mache coffins are loaded onto flatbed trucks.  Then Fr. Rick and a crew of Haitian volunteers drive to the city morgue and claim bodies so that they can be buried with dignity and Catholic rites.  As they drive through Port Au Prince volunteers flock to the trucks, willing to help the Priest they recognize as a friend.

Back in Boise, Chris is working to finish his documentary.  That involves completing interviews with doctors and other volunteers who have spent time with Fr. Rick and the children of St. Damien.  Next he’ll begin putting the finishing touches on his film.  It’s a complicated process that requires a lot of time and money, which Chris is currently trying to raise.  But Chris is motivated to finish the film by September so that it can be used at the next Project Haiti fundraising dinner in Boise.  “I want Father Rick to be able to use this,” he says.

Chris offers a bit of advice to aspiring filmmakers, “Don’t decide to make your first documentary about a person or a place that’s 3,000 miles away.”  And for the rest of us, “Remember what’s important.  We have so much here.”