LUCIDMEDIA

Velcrow Ripper searches for Fierce Light

Written by Adam A. Donaldson Tuesday, 25 August 2009 14:07

Documentary filmmaker Velcrow Ripper has carved his niche for himself in tackling difficult subject matter and trying to find the silver lining amongst the human stories. In 2005, he released the Genie Award-winning documentary Scared Sacred, and received national and international acclaim for his efforts to bring to light the incredible humanity demonstrated amongst some of the worst modern disasters. His new film, out on DVD Tuesday, intends to take things to the next level.
Fierce Light is about bringing together spirituality and activism. It follows thematically Scared Sacred, which chronicled Ripper’s travels to disaster sites around the world, from Union Carbide in Bhopal to Ground Zero in New York City, as he searched for meaning in the face of unmitigated, man-made disaster.

As it turns out, Fierce Light is part of an intended trilogy that will eventually be accompanied by other material in the form of books and websites. Its origin can be traced back to 1995 when Ripper helped build a website in Netscape 1.0 for what he then called the Scared Sacred project. When it came time to find funding for the films, he put together his ideas for all three documentaries in order to get money for all three at the same time. “It just overwhelmed everyone, so we scaled them back a bit and decided to fund them one at a time,” explains Ripper on the phone from Toronto.

“I talk about faith or hope, but it’s not faith in religion or in a particular individual,” he says about Fierce Light, which is another travelogue for Ripper. But in this instance he’s looking at the ways everyday people are trying to effect a change in their own backyard which is part of an overall global movement to a more world-centric view of community.

“I do have faith in the ultimate goodness of humanity and I know the evidence doesn’t always indicate that,” says Ripper. “I look at it like a troubled teenager: you try to imagine somebody working with [them], like a social worker or something, and somewhere in all those problems that that kid’s facing, there’s a good person that wants to come out. And sometimes we have to work through our problems to get to who we really are, and I believe that, and that’s what keeps me going.”

Themes of community, responsibility, caring, self-improvement and world-improvement are all part of Fierce Light, as well as ideas on how humanity can get past our outdated ideas and philosophies concerning discrimination, technology and capitalism. “My work seems to be about bringing together paradoxes, things that don’t seem to go together but when you do bring them together there’s some huge juice to be found in those pairings.”
Ripper credits his approach to filmmaking as the reason why he’s able to get these big ideas across. By putting himself in his films, he says, it binds these huge subjects together, bringing them down to a personal scale. “I don’t put myself in my films because I want to be in them,” he explains, “I put myself in them because I need to be [in them].”

The filmmaker says that he takes his films through two phases: the research phase where he and his team look at who is the major thinker in a field and then the actual pursuit of those subjects. Occasionally, these pursuits take Ripper and his crew in unexpected directions, like the examination of the plight of the Dalit people of India, a so-called undesirable cast presently going through their own civil rights movement at home.

But the main subjects, interviewees like the Archbishop Desmond Tutu sometimes take whole years to arrange interview time with. To get the Buddhist peace activist monk Thich Nhat Hahn, Ripper spent a month following him from monastery to monastery across Vietnam. “Every day I’d ask ‘how about today?’ and they’d say ‘no, not today,’” recalls Ripper with a laugh. It was only after running into the monk along a path at one of monasteries that Ripper got his interview with Thich Nhat Hahn. “He was getting familiar with this Canadian camera crew that was following him around everywhere, and he looked at me and I was really nervous and he was like, ‘I think we’ll do the interview tomorrow.’ So finally, it actually happened.”

But one doesn’t need to travel as far as Vietnam to see the movement at work. Ripper points to the debate in the U.S. over healthcare reform as an example of the dramatic struggle to change the way we think from an egocentric to a world-centric view. Where the human race must try to move beyond think in limited individualistic means and look at a broader, global perspective. Ripper calls this shift “compassionate activism,” or the notion that change is individual and that the problems we face are so vast that everyone on the planet must own a piece of it. “Life is a balance between independence and interdependence,” he says. “Nobody’s saying that we shouldn’t be individuals, but let’s celebrate our individuality in context of our interconnectiveness.”

One of the places he visits is South Central Farms in Los Angeles, an urban garden in the South Central area of L.A. established shortly after the Rodney King Riots in 1994. It was sold to a developer in 2004 who immediately moved forward with getting the farm demolished and the farmers evicted. The farmers put up a good fight, in court and in the press, but ultimately the LAPD forcibly evicted protestors from the land in 2006. Hardly the success story needed for both the movement and Ripper’s film, right?

“The way that story unfolded has actually made it heard by so many more people,” explains Ripper. “And the South Central Farmers themselves, their community, has strengthened over this issue, and they’re stronger than they ever were right now. So the surface defeat isn’t really a defeat at all, it’s just another stage in the journey. [...] If you look at the American Civil Rights movement, all we remember now was that it was a big success, but the price that they paid was really high. People were killed.”

The third film in the trilogy will be called Evolve Love: The Meaning is Life, and is scheduled for completion in 2012. Ripper says that Evolve Love will be about the evolution on consciousness in a time of a crisis. “[It’s] the idea that we’re going to need a paradigm shift if we’re going to make the transition from the industrial growth society, the life destroying civilization, to the life-sustaining civilization.” Ripper says that he’ll be looking for, what he calls “evolutionary communities” around the world.