Next he identifies a ship: possibly an example of "contact art" – Aborigines recording their impressions of early settlers – or a carving created by the western crew of a 19th-century pearling ship.
Because financing was difficult to obtain, it took him more than a decade to complete, and the scenes shot in rural Ethiopia, many of them with illiterate peasants in the cast, with a mainly Western crew, posed one logistical challenge after another.
Perhaps a thousand villagers had gathered to watch the Western crew at work.
The Western wildfire crews with their dark-green cargo pants and sun-chapped skin.
Wherever she went, she was photographed by western news crews and locals.
But a more fitting epitaph may have been the admonition offered by a government minder who tried to stop Western TV crews from going into the church's courtyard and filming the pile of bombing debris in the adjacent plot, the one identified by the girl as a military installation.
With western camera crews and photographers arriving at the site in the past 24 hours, more detailed reports have emerged of how the jihadis reduced several temples, columns and other treasures to heaps of stone in acts of vandalism to match some of the destructions in the wake of the European religious and political revolutions.
A BBC team have become one of the first western TV crews to return to Kobane.
Large fires in places with names like Baker Canyon, Foster Creek, Miller Homestead, West Crater, Chrandal Creek, Trout Creek, Sawmill Canyon, Clay Springs and Ashland have spread the western wildfire crews thin.
'I thought there was something indulgent and wrong about the circus of activity created by a western film crew in the midst of such dire poverty,' he says.
