“Coffee?” I asked while lighting the propane canister. The seven wilderness guides sitting next to me all nodded in exhaustion. After eight hours of hiking and leading groups through the deep rainforest of the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, they looked like they could use a coffee.
It had been exactly four months since I started working with a wildlife research team outside of Corcovado National Park. I was a 22-year-old aspiring National Geographic photographer living a wildlife enthusiast’s dream; leading primate surveys at dawn, meeting volunteers and research students from around the world, running on the remote beach, bonding with new friends on our campsite, and photographing one of the most biodiverse landscapes in the world. Yet there was a consistent pull from an untethered source that kept telling me to move on.
As we sat sipping our coffees and discussing the juvenile tapir that had walked across the campsite earlier, one of the guides asked me a question. “Why does your coffee taste special?”
“Because it’s not coffee,” I replied, “it’s a little cup of connection.”
I am almost positive he was referring to the fact that I had added coconut powder to the coffee, but the answer had surprised even myself. We laughed at the comical response, and the group conversation moved on to a subject that surpassed my level of Spanish at the time.
That response, that moment, was the start of the largest undertaking of my career so far. It was the conversation that culminated my years of drinking coffee, my love of coffee shops, my instinct to offer someone tea upon first meeting; it was the moment that helped me to develop the thesis for my feature-length documentary, The Connected Cup.
“Because it’s not coffee...it’s a little cup of connection.”
A documentary that encompasses the heart of coffee and tea as universal human connectors. The story led me around the world to film and to follow this unifying narrative. From the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro to the Sahara desert, in Italian cafes and the wild coffee forest of Ethiopia, the Costa Rican cloud forests to Japan’s serene tea farms, sharing coffee from a VW van in Colorado to a pot of chai on the streets of India, and culminating these connections amidst a matriarchal village in Kenya. Eventually revealing the true “connected cup” as clean-water.
As the director and creator of the documentary, this is more than a story to me, it is a tangible piece of my soul. The people, communities, and cultures represented in the documentary encompass every aspect of the true heart behind coffee and tea. These are the stories that remind me of why I started in journalism and documentary filmmaking in the first place. And these stories are the reason I continue to create.
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