Martin Luther King called it "love in action". Ghandi's phrase was "soul force".
Canada's Velcrow Ripper calls it "fierce light" -- a combination of spirituality and activism that he sees gathering strength on a global level. This is what his hopeful new movie, Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action, attempts to illuminate.
The death of a friend during a peaceful protest is the catalyst for investigation at the beginning of Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action. Despite this tragedy, Ripper senses a sea change, a growing general consciousness that, "Another world is possible." So can spirituality coexist with social activism?
His journey of discovery begins in the deep American south, where monuments to the civil rights movement introduce Alice Walker and Congressman John Lewis, among others, in conversations about racism, determination and love in the midst of hate.
(Ripper's film includes conversations with politicians, environmentalists, philosophers and human-rights activists, among them Desmond Tutu, Thich Nhat Hanh, Van Jones, tree-inhabitor Julia Butterfly Hill, Sera Beak of the Harvard School of theology, Judy Rebick, actress Daryl Hannah, and many others.)
Central to the story is a farm in the worst part of Los Angeles, a sudden oasis in the midst of urban blight, where locals work the land and talk about the magical place that keeps their kids off the streets. When the land is sold to a developer, and it looks as if the farm will be destroyed, people from all walks of life turn up to protest. The movie traces the connection between this land and peaceful protests all around the world, and checks in with a variety of experts willing to talk about "the possibility of illumination." Like some kind of modern-day Diogenes -- only with a camera instead of a lantern -- Ripper goes to conflict zones, ceremonies and festivals to discover the growing need for peaceful and productive change.
Fierce Light offers a wide variety of interpretations of spirituality. Connectedness is a common thread, and that connection extends to the planet and every aspect of nature.
Some people march and carry signs and some pray, but almost everyone Ripper interviews is willing to talk about love. Maybe a soft answer really doth turneth away wrath.
Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action, is the second film from Velcrow Ripper that investigates peace, love and understanding. Scared Sacred, his 2005 award-winning documentary, followed his search for hope in the worst 'ground-zero' areas -- from Hiroshima to the toxic dumping ground of Bhopal.
Once again, his ideas are all tied together with magnificent visuals. Some moments, such as a few intense close-ups on human faces, veer a bit too close to the twee; for the most part, however, Ripper celebrates the best of being alive with shots of people and places that are often gobsmacking in their beauty and power.
The film is anti-violence and anti-war; it's about the physical world and how we live in it, and what the future may be because of that. As one subject says, are we going to be locusts or bumble bees?
Fierce Light says we must change to survive as a species.
The place where spirituality and action meet is a spot where you'll want to put down those weapons and be kind to each other and to the planet.
Couldn't hurt.
(This film is rated PG)
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