Films on Heartfulness
San Francisco's hundred-year-old Tenderloin neighborhood is its Skid Row, but it is also home to the city's most diverse population. The Tenderloin retains an idiosyncratic spirit that has been driven out of much of downtown by commercialization and gentrification. Wounded though it may be, the Tenderloin still pulses with a beating heart that much of San Francisco can scarcely sense anymore. Long may it beat to the rhythm of its own drummers.
Explore Old Hawaii on the archipelago's biggest and newest island, awash in lava, sparkling in mid-Pacific seas. Crowned by 13,803 feet above the Pacific, Mauna Kea is the highest summit in the Hawaiian island chain and still smokes on a continuous basis. When its underwater height is included, at 33,000 feet, it is second only to Mt. Everest. Yet its lava-etched terrain makes it the least populated of the entire archipelago.
Explorers Mark Sommer and Joanne Brem spend two nights and three days on Bai Tu Long Bay and Halong Bay in the far north of Vietnam on a Vietnamese junk called Dolphin. They swim, paddle and motor among towering vine-shrouded karst mountains where locals fish, cook, chat and live entirely on floating platforms, seldom treading on dry land. Their rare way of life is now being eclipsed by the inexorable industrialization of surrounding waterways.
This feature-length film is the tale of two journeys to Hanoi by an American journalist at both ends of a long life -- as a young man in 1968 at the height of a decade-long war between a poor, undeveloped Asian nation and the world's leading superpower; and half a century later, as Vietnam becomes a turbo-charged economic powerhouse. Wartime Hanoi experienced a fleeting season of tranquility. Captured in rare black-and-white photographs of everyday life in a city and country under siege, this film offers a window into a time and place until now largely forgotten by its own people. Half a century later, in 2015, I returned to Hanoi to find that the Vietnamese have largely let go of the past in order to embrace a more promising future.
Beside San Francisco Bay, a former construction trash landfill site was left undeveloped for more than thirty years. During that time, homeless people from the region gradually built a community from wood scraps, rebar, scrap metal and other discarded construction materials. Together with local artists, they painted slabs of former sidewalks in brilliantly colored graffiti. Freelance sculptors assembled sculptures of exceptional originality. They evoke exhilaration, triumph and resilience. In recent years, the City of Albany returned the site to the regional park authority. Local residents organized to save the uniquely compelling public art created over decades. The Albany Bulb has become an outdoor museum that is in some ways more original and intriguing than much of what hangs in our most highly esteemed museums.
In San Francisco's colorful Mission District between 16th and 24th streets and surrounding alleys is the city's most vivid and creative concentration of street galleries, murals painted on the the backsides and sometimes front sides of businesses, warehouses, garages, schools and playgrounds. Every surface, it seems, is fair game -- anything that stands still long enough to paint. Muralismo began as political protest but between its cartoon figures, its flagrant use of color and an irrepressible sense of humor about itself, Mission style art is more exuberant than angry. Its appeal is visceral, meeting you at eye level amid the clamor of traffic and urban grit. The vitality of this uncredentialed art conveys a community's inextinguishable passion for life.
At age 71, Leonard Pitt discovered late-life love for a grandson whose birth he initially opposed. The unfolding of his relationship with Miles, son of Lenny's adopted son, reawakened his appreciation for life's simple pleasures as he watched Miles experience his first flower and other everyday miracles. As Miles discovered life for the first time, Lenny rediscovered his own curiosity and wonder.
Following the suicide of his son, Steve Fugate, a self-described "regular guy" from Vero Beach, Florida, began hiking the highways of America carrying a sign on his backpack with two simple words: LOVE LIFE. Wherever he went, he urged those he met to cherish their lives no matter how difficult their circumstances. Twelve years and 29,000 miles later he finished his transcontinental journey a changed man, wiser and more joyful for having opened his heart to both his grief and his resilience.
This film is an in-depth conversation with the late Pete Seeger, the legendary folksinger and social activist, featuring songs both recorded and sung in-studio. Filmed when he was 88, Pete was finally receiving long-overdue appreciation for his immense contributions to American music and culture. An often controversial figure for his uncompromising stands on social and political issues, he was blacklisted and consigned to singing in summer camps till the 1960's. He then helped father the Sixties folk revival that served as the era’s soundtrack. Pete recalls it all through the prism of mellowed memory. He sings with a quavering but still strong voice accompanied by his eternally tuneful banjo. This conversation is a classic affirmation of human possibilities from the stubbornly hopeful spirit of an American folk icon.
At the time of our meeting in front of San Francisco’s Ferry Building, Gabriel Angelo Master Blaster G was a thirteen-year-old trumpeter with a passion for song and dance. A self-described cross between Louis Armstrong and Fred Astaire, he makes all the world his stage and glories in the sheer pleasure of entertaining. A native of Oakland, California, he attended the School for the Arts but spent all his spare time performing as a busker. I first encountered Gabriel strutting and trumpeting like a rare bird in full plumage. I was so taken by his charm and audacity that on the spot I interviewed him. There he was, trumpeting "When the saints..." for the pure pleasure of dancing to the melody of his heart.
At ages 76 and 68, life-long adventurers Mark and Joanne settled in an ancient Mayan village on the shores of legendary Lake Atitlan in the rural highlands of Guatemala. There, they discovered that while we Westerners have watches, Mayans have time. Planting gardens of veggies and native flowers, they learned the slower rhythms of an ancient culture. As our Mayan friend Adres told us, “We don’t have much, but we have each other.”
Among the small villages surrounding Guatemala’s Lake Atitlan live thousands of indigenous Mayans, descendants of a once-great civilization. Many still wear vivid handwoven clothing unique to their villages and speak local dialects in addition to Spanish. Drawn by the glory of the setting and the vibrant indigenous culture, expats have settled among them. They come for a few days and find themselves staying for decades.
Through centuries of oppression, poverty and genocide as recent as the 1980's, the Mayan people have retained a resilience almost unique among the world's native peoples. Mothers and their daughters still dress in vivid woven fabrics of their own making and unique to their own villages. This is the third of three films about Mayan Guatemala, based on numerous visits over half a century. Despite a five-hundred-year history of oppression by colonial occupiers, the resilience of the Mayan people remains a mystery and inspiration to a world sorely in need of it.
Ha Giang province in the far northeast of Vietnam is the wildest and least visited region in the country. A land of spectacuilar limestone outcroppings and ethnic minority peoples still largely undisturbed by the juggernaut of development affecting the rest of Vietnam, Ha Giang is a world apart. A six-day journey to this region within a few kilometers of the Chinese border and Yunnan Province is a sometimes arduous but altogether memorable adventure.
Crete is a Greek island closer to the coast of North Africa than to mainland Greece that is its political identity. Fifteen hundred years older than the rest of Greece, the Bronze Age Minoan civilization dates back to 3100 BC, the oldest culture in Europe. apart with a culture fifteen hundred years older than the mainland of Greece. Women played major roles in Minoan civilization in religion, culture, and possibly even governance. This film includes visits to Knossos and museums of Minoan culture.
Dwight Elder grew up in Funktown, a neighborhood riddled by youth violence. Oakland, California is a city with one of the nation's highest rates of homicide. Dwight's father lived and died by the gun and many of his closest friends are either in jail or dead, killed in early adulthood. Haunted by the question, "Why?", Dwight has chosen to dedicate his life to using the camera in place of the gun to probe the sources of the anger, poverty and despair in so many of his "homeboys" today. Shooting pictures, not people, Dwight brings his charisma, conviction, and affection for his family, friends, and community to bear on one of the most urgent challenges facing inner cities today.
Author, actor and oral historian Studs Terkel was a legendary storyteller with a passion for ordinary people with extraordinary gifts. In this video, adapted from an award-winning radio program, Studs describes his life and times from the perspective of nine decades listening to people of every background and belief. A progressive populist with a love of the quirky particularity of humanity, he was an unapologetic liberal intellectual. In this program, drawn from a nonstop three-hour conversation, Studs celebrates the battered but unbowed spirit of extraordinary ordinary Americans.
Chocolate must flow to release its magic. By reawakening its melting heart, Cocoa Rustica liberates the transformative energy in cacao. It revives a 4,000-year-old Mayan tradition of drinking and cooking with 100% cacao to nourish body and soul. In this pure form, cacao possesses an incomparable ability to rejuvenate. This video, filmed and produced by Caroline Harrison of The Hive Studios, is a portrait of the culture and community of Cocoa Rustica.
Chinese-born Lily Yeh came to the United States decades ago to study classical Chinese landscape painting but found herself painting very different landscapes in the burnt-out abandoned lots of North Philadelphia. Together with community residents she took broken shards of glass and dinner plates, blasted bricks, and other debris and made them into brilliant mosaics. In the process, she catalyzed the emergence of a remarkable community art project on a grand scale, now called the Village of Arts and Humanities. She has gone on to take her social art to genocide survivors in Rwanda, trash scavengers in Nairobi, and migrant workers' children in Beijing. In this stirring conversation, Lily describes the evolution of her art and heart.
Resilience: Adaptation and Transformation in Turbulent Times describes how individuals, communities, and nature in response to misfortune not only survive but thrive and grow stronger in the process. In April 2008, natural and social scientists from around the world gathered in Stockholm, Sweden for the first-ever global conference applying lessons from nature's resilience to human societies in the throes of unprecedented change. This program features in-depth conversations with six key figures in the emerging resilience movement.