Scenes of violent street protests tend to capture the attention of the news media during major political summits. Is aggression the only meaningful method of activism in a world in which people feel detached from world leaders, though? That is a question asked by Canadian independent filmmaker Velcrow Ripper in his latest documentary, Fierce Light.

Velcrow Ripper has been directing fiction and documentary films since his teenage years and even his earliest productions had political themes. He is no militant, though. Inspired by such activists as Gandhi and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, he seems more intent on encouraging introspection than persuasion. Fierce Light exemplifies that. The film essentially chronicles Ripper's personal exploration of different methods of activism and raises more questions than it answers. His approach, combined with some beautiful and striking images from some of the world's most exotic places, makes Fierce Light feel more like Baraka than An Inconvenient Truth or one of Michael Moore's polemics.

Fierce Light focuses particularly on links between activism and different forms of spirituality. The people interviewed by Ripper, who include Thich Nhat Hanh, Desmond Tutu, Daryl Hannah, American civil rights activist John Lewis and Julia Butterfly Hill, cover a range of views on spirituality from traditional religious associations to the realm of what are often unfairly dismissed as 'New Age' ideas. Ripper, who grew up in the Baha'i faith and admits early in the film to challenging his commitment to it, comes out in favour of neither side. Indeed, his film provides some thought-provoking examples of the power of peaceful protest from both religious and secular sources.

Fierce Light, subtitled When Spirit Meets Action, won the Special Jury Prize and the National Film Board Audience Award at the Vancouver International Film Festival. It was also an Official Selection of the Hot Docs International Film Festival in Toronto and the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam.  It is currently available on DVD in Canada and the United States from E1 Entertainment and can also be viewed online at screen.myfilmblog.com. To watch the trailer, click on the Trailer tab above.

Velcrow Ripper recently chatted with CinemaSpy.com about Fierce Light. In the interview he explained that the film is the second part of a trilogy that explores the power of peaceful action and progressive societies. He also talked about his own origins as a filmmaker, the logistical challenges of making independent films that span the globe and how their personnel subject matter of his films has influenced his approach to directing.

CinemaSpy: What got you into filmmaking?

Velcrow Ripper: How did I start? Well, I started quite young actually, at about the age of 14. I live on Toronto Island now but I grew up in Gibson on the Sunshine Coast in BC. As a group of high school students we actually went to the CRTC [Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission], presented a brief and were granted permission to run our own community cable station, [to be] run by the high school. And it's still run by them. Then in the course of doing that I made my first documentary at the age of 14 called Iran: the Crisis. I was also at that time a media activist, so my activism combined with my filmmaking further on.

CinemaSpy: What was Iran: The Crisis about?

Velcrow Ripper: It was about the takeover of Iran when the Shah was ousted and Khomeini came in.

CinemaSpy: Fierce Light is a striking title. Where did that come from?

Velcrow Ripper: It's part of a trilogy and the first in the trilogy was called Scared Sacred. If you notice, the title contains all the same letters in both words and is kind of about paradox in a way. The second title also needed to somehow contain within it a seeming contradiction, in this case that idea of a fierceness and a lightness. They seem like opposites. So it just emerged out of that. The search for that kind of paradoxical pairing.

CinemaSpy: How would you describe Fierce Light?

Velcrow Ripper: It's a very cinematic, theatrical and engaging film that's intended to give you a first-hand taste of 'soul force' - what Gandhi called 'soul force' or what I'm calling 'fierce light' - through a narrative arc. So it was really intended to be a journey that you would get engaged in. It's trying to affect you not just on the head but on the heart level, which is not something documentaries don't always try to do. This film is intended to really be a visceral experience. And even, dare I say, a spiritual experience. That is something that great art does succeed in doing. A great symphony can be considered a spiritual experience. I think really good cinema can do that, too.

This film is actually about this pairing of spirituality and action or activism. Activists actually have rejected spirituality. They tend to be quite in their heads. They know the facts and they'll drown you in facts — "Here is the CO₂ emissions," or "Here's all the information," — and it's not alone always enough to sustain people. And also they drive on anger a lot as well, which also is not sustainable. So the spiritual sense for me is grounding it in compassion and really tapping into the power that has to propel us and make us care. The head alone isn't going to be enough. We need to get moved. And I know that people who are ecologists or biologists are also often some of the most depressed people around because they know really how bad things are. Others might not know those details and I would say that one of the things that the film tries to do is offer us a source of hope. And all my films now are in the context of a global crisis, which I think is undeniable.

One of the roles of this compassionate activism or this shift in the way we create change is also to give us strategies for maintaining hope in the face of crisis. In fact that's what Scared Sacred was all about. In that film I went to the ground zeros of the world, the place where you'd least expect to find hope, searching for it, because I actually think that the worst thing that could happen right now is that humanity gives up. You've seen it in some tribes in the Amazon where their numbers have been reduced, their land has disappeared and they just stop procreating. Turning crisis into compassion is really the root of it. And [Anthony] Van Jones, who's in the film and is now what they're calling Obama's Green Czar in Obama's cabinet, he said that anger is like burning diesel and we need to learn to burn solar.

The other big focus of this compassionate activism that Fierce Light focuses on is a shift in activism to focusing more on what we're for than just on what we're against. So it's solution based. So much of what's happening, and so much of the way change happens in the world today is through the media. We live in a mediated culture and wars are fought as much in the public arena as they are on the battleground ...  The message of Gandhi and the message of Martin Luther King was that the most effective tool you have is your ethical integrity. And when you react with violence, you've lost that in the public eyes. We've had extreme examples of what you could call violent activism and it's called terrorism. It has not made this world a safer place and it has not really accomplished their aims, unless — and this could be their aims — [it] is just to completely destabilize things and get everyone fighting everyone as much as possible. It just creates a cycle of violence.

CinemaSpy: How do you define spirituality in the sense in which you mean it in Fierce Light?

Velcrow Ripper: That's a very good question. In the film I make a point of distinguishing spirituality from religion. Commonly — and in the subject of this film — among activists and political types they've thrown out spirituality because they associate it as being either fundamentalist religion or New Age woo-woo. Some people say just throw the word out altogether, it's just too confusing. No two people mean the same thing. But I think we do need the word and we do need it in our lives. And for me, I see spirituality as coming from a depth perspective. More than anything, what the film comes back to is the idea of what Archbishop Desmond Tutu calls 'ubuntu', and in Buddhism what they refer to as ‘inter-being'. And so, almost a definition of spirituality for me is that we are all interconnected. That in turn is also reflected in science in systems theory. So it's nothing woo-woo at all. It's just an understanding. In other forms of thought they call it 'Love'. Capital 'L' Love. Agape love. That, to me, is also another definition of the word spiritual. If a religion promotes hatred, isolationism and violence, I would say it is counter-spiritual. A religion isn't necessarily spiritual.

CinemaSpy: What do you have in mind for the follow up to Fierce Light, the third part of the trilogy?

Velcrow Ripper: It's called Evolve Love: The Meaning is Life and it's about the search for cutting edge evolutionary communities and individuals. It's the idea that we're on an evolutionary path and that humanity's in a kind of adolescent state. What does it take to get us to a global maturity and what does that look like. So I'm looking at things like eco-villages, like Gaviotas in Columbia. It's a remarkable story of an eco-village where they built these teeter-totter pumps that the kids play on in the playground to pump the community's water. The story of Bhutan, which has the world's first Gross National Happiness Index. And what's going on in Bolivia right now, which is the world's first modern, indigenous-led nation state, with practicing participatory democracy. So new evolutionary paradigms for where we could go as a planet in a time of global crisis. Every film I do is in a time of global crisis [laughs].

CinemaSpy: It sounds like Scared Sacred and Fierce Light were enlightening experiences for you on a personal level. Has that affected your approach to filmmaking?

Velcrow Ripper: Well I think my films have always been — and I've been really blessed by this — a personal journey of discovery. I couldn't spend five years making a film if it wasn't something I was absolutely passionate about and that I needed to understand for myself at the deepest level. And it's interesting because the third in the trilogy is also about bringing together spirituality and rationality this time, or spirituality and science. I've integrated my understanding of crisis and how to transform a crisis into an opportunity with Scared Sacred. I had learned how to combine my activism and my spirituality on the journey of Fierce Light, and how to have a real soul force, and I next want to really look at the idea of a fully integrated human and how can I bring together...Alan Watt calls it the goopy part of me and the prickly sharp part of me — the objectivist part of me and the subjective part of me, and make those work together. Science and spirituality. So that's the internal quest to these films. And each one brings me to a deeper and deeper place and understanding of that. With each film, I travel with the films and I teach a workshop related to the subject as well, and they always say you teach what you need to learn.

CinemaSpy: You travel all over the world, which must be quite a logistical challenge. Can you talk a bit about planning and executing that.

Velcrow Ripper: Yeah, sure. I have the world's greatest producer, Cher Hawrysh, and we are FierceLight Films, the two of us. She works really tirelessly. She's the only person that works as hard on the films as I do. Together – especially during with Fierce Light the seven month shooting period — we're making decisions about what...I might need someone in Africa who then leads to a story in India and are we going to follow it through? We really have to think on the fly a lot. With documentaries there are often also breaking stories. With Fierce Light the story of South Central Farms suddenly happened before we had any money, Daryl Hannah gave me a call and she was a big fan of Scared Sacred. She called me up and said, "South Central Farms is about to be destroyed and they've called people to come down and try to help save the farm in South Central LA." Have you heard of the film The Garden? That's the same story that featured in that [and] it's one of the through lines in Fierce Light as well. So we had to decide whether I should hop on a plane without any funding and go down and join the encampment and it was too important to miss so we made a call and the next day I hopped on a plane. It became a really important story actually. Daryl Hannah and Julia Butterfly trying to save this farm from destruction - the largest urban garden in North America. So you're always thinking on your feet.

CinemaSpy: You have to be very flexible with a film of this nature

Velcrow Ripper: And hopefully your investors are as well [laughs]

CinemaSpy: How are you hoping to affect people with this trilogy of films?

Velcrow Ripper:  I hope to help and be part of the movement that I think is the biggest project that's taking place on the planet right now: the movement from an industrial growth society — a life-destroying society — to a sustainable society, sustainable on multiple levels. A society of mutually enhancing relationships between each other and the planet, which I think is where we're going. That's the next step in our evolution is to get to that. Moving from the egocentric point of view to the world-centric point of view. And that's my activism. I consider myself a media activist and that's the root of where I'm pointing people. I guess many, many people are working on this project but it's a shift we need to make right now. And it's why it's an exciting time to be alive because the stakes are really, really high and we get to choose to be part of the solution if we so desire. I'm hopeful. I'm very hopeful. I think we are waking up. Change is happening really fast. There are two graphs: there's the graph of destruction and there is the graph of transformation. It's anybody's guess which one is going to peak out first but I choose hope.


ALSO OUT THERE:

The Garden:
 
[From the film's website] The fourteen-acre community garden at 41st and Alameda in South Central Los Angeles is the largest of its kind in the United States. Started as a form of healing after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992, the South Central Farmers have since created a miracle in one of the country’s most blighted neighborhoods. Growing their own food. Feeding their families. Creating a community. But now, bulldozers are poised to level their 14-acre oasis.

The Garden follows the plight of the farmers, from the tilled soil of this urban farm to the polished marble of City Hall. Mostly immigrants from Latin America, from countries where they feared for their lives if they were to speak out, we watch them organize, fight back, and demand answers.

The Garden was written and directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy. It won the Grad Jury Award at least the the Silverdocs Documentary Festival in 2008 and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the International Documentary Association's Pare Lorentz Award this year. It is available on DVD from Oscilloscope Laboratories in the United States and Canada. To view the trailer, go to the CinemaSpy.com Facebook page.


This is the latest in a series of articles dedicated to profiling films that you might not know about. These will be movies that have been restricted to the film festival circuit, had only a limited theatrical release or perhaps not crossed your radar for some other reason. Please let us know what you think. Also, feel free to point out any such films that you think other readers should know about.