Translated by Amauris Betancourt Gómez.
The very moment her mind was made up about bringing journalism to her life, she felt a special attraction to the television world to which she has already devoted two decades.
 |
| Katiuska León, ITABO Producciones´ president. Foto: Ernesto Borrero. |
Katiuska Leon Borrero is passionate; she owns a clean, seducing voice and has a gift for getting herself across. She has moved thousands of people with reports evoking human feelings, and she has won admiration over because of comments and critical news about difficult and polemic, everyday-life topics. Her talent and heartfelt job approach have given her a name in audiovisual journalism in the Cuban eastern province of Granma.
Although journalism accounts for her greatest passion, Katy, so she is known, gets around skillfully in other audiovisual specialties -TV broadcaster, program director and script-writer- all of which make up her daily menu in CNCTV, the provincial local TV station where she began working since she finished university in 2001.
Katy never stops dreaming up, and she doesn´t either sit down to wait for such dreams to come true by themselves. That´s why she has devoted time and determination to ITABO Producciones (IPs), an audiovisual project she started off cooking many years ago and is now full on the go.
When and how does ITABO Producciones come into being?
ITABO was founded back in December 2019. Some of my Tv co-workers from different specialties -cameraman, editor, journalist and communicator- got together and gave a thought to the idea of making up a creative group thanks to the legal possibilities of the Cuban “State Creator´s Registry for Audiovisual Artists”. We wanted to organize a project apart from each one´s professional spaces in the CNCTV. That was something crazy because we had no technologies. We counted only on the know-how and the desire to do.
The name of the project was your idea. Why Itabo?
We worked it out together. Rather than personalizing the name, we decided looking for a word to picture the members; but I found it, by the way, out of curiosity. During a press tour to the municipality of Río Cauto, we visited kind of a hamlet or rural community named precisely Itabo. The word called my eye, and I asked about its meaning, but no one knew. I supposed it was a Cuban word with aboriginal or Arawak roots. I needed to know because I was going to use it in my news report. So I searched for it, and if there was any other place named likewise. Itabo meant “land surrounded by water”.
I liked it and I said to myself: we are a project pretending to go beyond boundaries”, because outreaching national scope was among our initial goals. And I linked that to Cuba, a water-surrounded country so it sounded attractive and ideal to me. In the next group's meeting I came up with it, how I ran into the word and that way everybody, from his job experience, took over how Itabo could work for the group identity.
How
are ITABO members like? What tells them apart?
I wrote something down once in my facebook profile that later would define ITABO: unity. A good team doesn´t only measure itself up for the members' professional capabilities, not because they could be more or less intelligent, but for hanging together and being assertive. That is the essence that defines ITABO. Projects are taken over and carried out as a team, and everyone goes beyond his job.
What does IPs offer?
 |
| ITABO while shooting |
Our group give clients the opportunity to be played and so known abroad in Cuban TV channel Cubavisión Internacional (CVI) that reaches 66 countries. There is the TV project “Por dentro mi Isla”, out of earlier “Por dentro” TV program that belong to CNCTV. I started being the announcer, then director and later scriptwriter too, but it was taken off the air and then ITABO took it over and made it suitable for an international audience. It aims at showing Cuba´s economic environment, and at promoting the domestic entrepreneurial sector on international levels, mainly those companies exporting and substituting importations with good results and impact in the domestic economic development.
Why should ITABO be chosen for a production?
Quality is taken for granted with us; IPs doesn´t only shoot, edit or publish but also thinks about the clients' visual identity. Its members get updated daily on the new world trends when it comes to audiovisual works. Everyone cares about getting up to date on the different specialties, and that preparation, that effort, results in quality of the product.
Which have been ITABO´s main clients to this date?
CALISUR Company (Camaronera del Litoral Sur), a Shrimp Farm Company, and the Non-Agricultural Cooperative (CNA) Segunda Villa were the first clients. Then different companies added up, such as the rice farming companies Fernando Echenique and the Jose Manuel Capote Sosa, the meat processing factory Vallerojo, and Granma´s Avicultural Enterprise too among many other important firms from the Granma province.
We have worked a lot with agricultural enterprises but also with individual producers and farmers, this last one an inspiring experience because there is a lot of tenderness in country folks. They have appealing life stories. And good clients satisfy us, those who keep faithful after working with us, as it is the case of Granma's rice companies.
Which of the filmed audiovisuals so far have you liked the best? Why?
The first one always marks; I love the one from the shrimp farm. It was filmed around the only still living founder´s life story, an old man that bore witness to Fidel Castro´s CALISUR Shrimp Farm foundation over 30 years ago. It was a work heartfully carried out. The goal, completely successful, was to set guidelines on the market we were sticking the nose in.
How do you stick to ITABO's brand in each production and that, at the same time, make it look fresh and different from previous productions?
It is a challenge. There are always resemblances, but the essence lies in finding out singularity. If you make it, you can follow an esthetic line and make stand out the peculiarity of every product or theme. Each subject is different and ITABO looks precisely for that customer's visual identity. Right now people and clients recognize our productions before our logo comes out, what brings pride because ITABO presupposes already kind of a brand, especially when it comes to visuality and sound.
Projections for next year?
Reaching CVI channel with two new TV-programs. One of those is “Lente médico”, aiming at showing Cuban health achievements in the world on the biopharmaceutical and the health care fields. Cuba is a world medicine power and I want to show it on the screen. I came up with the idea unexpectedly as I heard from two very complex surgeries in Bayamo, Granma, last year. One was a Whipple surgical procedure and the other, a high flow arterial venous correction of a malformation, which is a skull-face operation with low survival percentage, even in developed countries. They were both successful and I said to myself “I want to show it to the world”. The other one is “Cuba exporta”, a 15-minute production, on exportation.
We plan also in the future to undertake other esthetic lines of creation like video clips -we have already, but not that deeply- and to approach dramatized productions. There are indeed varied and multiple ideas of stories in stock. We would like too very much to co-produce with similar creative teams; right now there are some on the go with CVI on video-clips, short fiction and dramatized TV stories.
You easily fall in love with ideas, and that passion helps you accomplish them; you even believe them before they can be carried out. How do you manage to cope with ITABO, family, faith, profession…?
 |
| Camaraman Alex Gainza y Katiuska León. |
I have also spiritual projects that I would never put aside at all, but my family accounts for the biggest one. To help and back up my family and children, and yet keep being a good daughter and sister is, I believe firmly, my real life essence.
I am always pressed on time, but I don´t leave projects adrift. I accomplish them all with total discipline because I like keeping my word. I plan everything daily in advance to give everything the right time. The truth though is that now and then I neglect my family or take some time off from here or there but, when it happens, I make up for it later. Quitting is no choice at all, because everything counts and motivates my life.
Being positive and assertive to take over assignments make it easy for you to talk the team members into accepting and considering work proposals, mostly pressed on time?
I always tell the boys “never say no” to an idea before trying. A positive mind knocks walls down without blows at all. Looking to the future positively is what allows for goals to be reached. Although taking into account real life, there are always, of course, impossible things to carry out but I always bet on going on and that´s the key to success.
What does ITABO Productions mean to you?
IPs is more than something professional; it is a personal work in honor to Jose Villa. He was the person I have learned the most from about television. He always wanted to form a group to surpass creativity so we could both join too professionally. I owed it to him. IPs means standing out for an idea that came up in a beautiful marriage sharing profession and common goals. It is a debt of honor to Jose Villa and a personal achievement.
That way, out of love and sensibility, ITABO was born, from the heart of an intense, passionate woman that suffers from absolute optimism, although life has put her on trial quite too often.
Katy, a Cuban entrepreneur, is an excellent mother and very histrionic; she has a big smile, and above all a big heart making the best of it out of every working day. A woman that, for a year now, dreams high with ITABO.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario