SF DocFest: ScaredSacred
The line snaked down to Albion Street for the teensy Little Roxie theater's screening of Canadian film ScaredSacred for DocFest, filled with an odd mix of earnest well-scrubbed management consultants with expensive handbags, and less well-scrubbed but just as earnest Global Exchangers and their expensive Guatemalan backpacks. Inside the theater, we sat next to a woman demonstrating some dramatic move she'd learned in yoga involving thrusting her wide-spread legs up in the air to the giggled mortification of her companions, while the man behind us intoned in reaction, "Nothing breaks down the ego like yoga."
That's about as good an intro as you'll get for ScaredSacred, by a filmmaker named Steve who calls himself "Velcrow Ripper." Mr. Ripper (who did the sound for The Corporation) set out in 1999 to film places on the earth associated with death, destruction, and hopelessness and see if he could find any beauty there. So he sets forth on a whirlwind tour of, among other places: Bhopal, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Cambodia, New York on the week of 9/17/01, Hiroshima, and Israel/Palestine. As our companion noted, "This movie's going to be a real upper."
Some moving interviews and (okay, we're going to say it) kind of tedious voiceover, after the jump. Special bonus: the filmmaker screams like a girl when he gets shot at!
Okay, here's the good parts: Mr. Ripper did find some really beautiful things to film in places that we don't usually associate with the human spirit -- paper lantern boats in Hiroshima's river on the 50th anniversary of the A-bomb attack; an secret girls' school in Afghanistan; three Cambodian musicians who'd lost limbs in land mine accidents playing on; an Afghani musician who'd recently recovered his lute after hiding it from the Taliban -- good stuff. And the stories that people tell are devastating in their sadness -- parents who lose children, children who lose parents, Bosnians who throw themselves into their art to avoid looking out the window to see the dead bodies on the streets. Very impressive that Mr. Ripper could find these people and record their stories! And the images are beautiful, and the movie makes some very profound points about spirituality and dignity in places of crisis, which was definitely worth the price of admission alone.
But okay, the voiceovers. All right, maybe in retrospect, we were a little freaked out by the narration-less-ness of the first documentary we saw this DocFest -- but this maybe goes a little too far in the other direction. Really, it's very interesting that Mr. Ripper used this documentary as a way of exploring his own issues with death and the human spirit -- but honestly, after hearing a Bhopal doctor tell a very moving story about opening his clinic and demanding justice from Union Carbide, we don't really need to hear Ripper ask, "So.... did you see the sacred in the scared?" Insights like, "I went to Auschwitz, and I felt nothing," and "I breathe in suffering, and breathe out compassion" -- it just seemed a little trite. Show, don't tell!
Okay, we understand that his chatty-chatty is meant to help us in understanding the depth of the journey he's undergone -- but really, in comparison to the people he's profiling, his journey isn't the one that's got our attention. The only part of his personal story that seemed real and/or relevant was his total terror when, in the midst of his pontifications about the wall separating Israel and Palestine, an Israeli guard fires a warning shot in his direction. He runs like the wind! That's some scared/sacred right there!
We suspect this is a minority view of the movie, though -- everyone else coming out of the movie seemed very moved by the whole experience. It's not that we didn't like it -- it just seems like it could be even better with just one more round of editing. The stories he's recording deserve that, don't you think?