>>PREVIEW
SCARED SACRED
DIRECTED BY Velcrow Ripper
Opens Friday, October 21
Plaza Theatre
Documentary is often used as a method to explore and illuminate political, social and religious issues. But with Scared Sacred, Canadian filmmaker Velcrow Ripper has transcended these issues and brought documentary to the level of sacrament – a way to experience the holy.
It was the sacred that Ripper was looking for when he began filming Scared Sacred in 1999, starting off on a journey that would consume five years of his life. As the title suggests, he decided to look in the "scared," ravaged places of the world for stories of hope. And he found those stories, even where people warned him that there were none.
In Bhopal, India, over 20 years after a deadly gas leak at a pesticide factory killed more than 8,000 people, survivors and widows of the disaster run a holistic health clinic. In Cambodia, a former child soldier scours the jungle and uses his knowledge of landmines to disarm hundreds of them a week. In Kabul, Afghanistan, a Sufi musician evades the fundamentalist regime’s crackdown on music by burying his lute in the ground and digging it up more than four years later, plucking its strings with renewed spirit.
"Part of the quest was asking what is sacred and where can it be found?" says Ripper. "An answer to that question is, you can find the sacred absolutely everywhere in every situation in every instant."
Ripper captures those sacred things masterfully by focusing his camera on those who find immense joy in the seemingly smallest things. In one poignant scene, a group of boys are digging through debris in a crumbling and empty cinema in Afghanistan, pulling out mangled strips of film and holding them up to the camera. Each time they find another strip in the rubble, their faces light up, much like children’s faces light up during an exciting movie.
During the course of filming – an experience Ripper describes as a "pilgrimage" – he gleans insights from people of different faiths. The film shows that even though religion is the cause of much violence in the world, a compassionate faith can be a force for positive change.
"Religion’s been abused," Ripper says. "And I think progressive people have in some sense, surrendered faith and religion to the right wing…. There are many, many great insights in religion, and if we can take the insights and the truth and the meaning from religion or spirituality and leave the dogma behind, we’ll find incredible tools to help us deal with the crises that we’re facing."
Ripper was raised in the Baha'i faith, but doesn’t subscribe to any one religion. If people want to put him in a box, he says, they can call him a Sufi Buddhist Baha'i. Because he likes to strip away as much dogma from religion as he can, he’s left with a broad definition of what is sacred.
"One of my favourite definitions is one of Rabbi Michael Lerner’s, where he says, ‘What is the sacred? It’s the sense of awe and wonder and radical amazement,’" he says.
Ripper is currently working on a Scared Sacred book, and both it and the film are the first instalment of a trilogy. The next film and book will be about spiritual activism – social action and spirituality in the vein of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
"I’m increasingly interested in meditation and action," Ripper says. "That to me is the real challenge. What do you do when you’re off the cushion? How do you be truly present, really showing up in the moment?"
It is this embrace of the present moment, the acceptance of both suffering and joy, that makes Scared Sacred such a poetic and wonderfully human film. As Ripper says in the film, the sacred always appears, "even if it’s buried next to a landmine in the jungle." |
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