It almost never happens. You finish watching a film and as the credits roll and the music plays, you think “Everyone should see this film.” But everyone (and by everyone I mean everyone) should see Fierce Light. B.C.-born filmmaker Velcrow (Steve to his folks) Ripper’s beautiful, poetic, powerful and important film (produced by Calgary expat Cher Hawrysh) explores the possibility of profound, positive global change that can be realized “when spirit meets action.”
It opens with tragedy: the death of Ripper’s colleague and fellow media activist, Brad Will. Will was shot in 2006, in Oaxaca City, Mexico while filming unarmed civilians fleeing paramilitary forces. When Ripper arrived, Oaxaca was considered the second most dangerous place for journalists in the world, after Iraq. “The whole situation of going down to Oaxaca was like following in Brad’s footsteps and I didn’t want to follow all the way in his footsteps,” Ripper soberly confesses.
In a gorgeous, poetic shot that sets the tone for everything that follows, Ripper, wearing a bright orange shirt, executes a ballet-like tracking shot across a row of black-clad, armed and armoured riot police who are standing only a few feet away. It’s a beautiful image of an extremely tense standoff. Ripper claims that he doesn’t deliberately put himself in harm’s way, but sometimes, following the stories leads him into conflict zones. “I’ve filmed in Afghanistan and I was shot at in Palestine, and I’ve been in those scenarios,” he admits. “I also did a documentary about grizzly bears, and filming riot police is a lot like filming grizzly bears: You never know when they’re going to pounce, but you try to find out when they’re well fed and they’re not about to move. I didn’t think that was the moment, when they were actually going to attack.”
Seeing Brad Will’s final footage affected Ripper on a profound level. “As a cameraman myself, I could very easily imagine that very easily being my last footage,” he says. “It was so close to home.” Will’s death and the acknowledgment of the tremendous uphill struggle facing activists, both spiritual and earthbound, sparked a quest to seek out people living the change, people who possess what Ripper calls, the “fierce light or soul force.”
“People like the Gandhis or the Martin Luther Kings of today, who face innumerable setbacks and yet keep going and have successes,” says Ripper. Beginning in the deep south of the U.S. with John Lewis, a key figure in the civil rights movement and now a congressman in Washington, Fierce Light embarks on a global journey, both physical and metaphysical. Ripper profiles Archbishop Desmond Tutu, punk rock Buddhist Noah Levine, actor and activist Daryl Hannah, and Julia Butterfly Hill, who lived in an ancient, giant Redwood tree for two years to save it from destruction, among others. Along the way, Ripper finds the perceived contradiction between social activism and spiritual awareness to be unnatural and unproductive.
“In activist circles there has been such a rejection of all things spiritual because of religion, particularly fundamentalist religion, and what it has done to human rights and the planet in general,” he explains. “And yet I feel like they’ve thrown out the baby with the bathwater, because there is something to be said for what I call spiritual qualities. They’re important to have an integrated perspective on how we create change, which means coming from the heart, not just from the head. A lot of activism could be called re-activism, and that’s a problem. Activists are often very good at focusing on what they’re against, but they need to also learn to focus on what they’re for.”
Conversely, as spiritual activist Van Jones states, you’ve got to “put some feet under these prayers.” Throughout the film there’s an acknowledgement that the paradigm shift is both possible and absolutely necessary, that there is an almost universal recognition that the present state is unsustainable. Ripper wholeheartedly believes that the means must mirror the ideal, desirable end.
“Ultimately, when it comes to creating change, the more the process in which we create change is consistent with the world we want to see, the closer we are to creating that world,” he says. “Because we’re already living it, on the way to getting there. If our process of creating a better world is violent, then we’re delaying that world from coming into existence. Particularly in activism, I can’t think of an instance where violence is the way to go. That’s called terrorism. Nonviolence may take longer, but again, in what I call spiritual activism, we recognize that the process is as important as the end result.”
The positive potential expressed in Fierce Light seems to be growing exponentially. Four weeks into the film’s release, the response has been overwhelming. “I’ve been doing films for 25 years and this is the film that’s had the greatest impact on people,” Ripper says. “It speaks to something that people are feeling.”
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