Movie Monthly: Soul Force at Work

In the 2004 feature documentary Scared-Sacred, activist filmmaker Velcrow Ripper went to what he called the “ground zeros' of the planet - post 9/11 New York, Bhopal, Hiroshima – in search of hope in humanity's darkest hours.

With his latest feature documentary, Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action, Ripper leads us once again through the shadows although here his meditative quest for inner truth and understanding stems from a more personal tragedy. Journalist friend Brad Will was shot dead while filmming protests in Oaxaca Mexico in October 2006.

"Brad's death shook me to the core," says Ripper in the film's narrative.

It sets him questioning the relationship between two aspects of himself – the activist filmmaker and the spiritual self and how they work together.

As he crosses the globe following stories of activists who took huge risks for a cause you begin to get a sense of what he means when he says, “I feel tremors of a volcanic spirit starting to build all over the globe to the cry: 'Another world is possible.'”

In what is a poetic call to heartfelt action, Ripper asks how, with the batons and blows raining down, do activists maintain their composure and the certainty of their convictions. Civil rights activist, now congressman, John Lewis, says even after being beaten and left for dead on the Bloody Sunday march of 1965 in Selma Alabama, hatred and violence were never an option. “We just gotta love the hell out of them,” Lewis recalls his mentor Martin Luther King saying to him.

Ripper reflects on the ideas of Gandhi who called this inner strength “soul force” or “truth force” and whose non-violent doctrine has been taken up by generations of activists.

The documentary regularly comes back to a protest to save a large urban farm in South Central Los Angeles from being bulldozed for development. Clearly this little piece of Eden is cherished by and has enriched the hundreds of people young and old who cultivate it.

The farm's plight is splashed across the news as actress Daryl Hannah and Julia Butterfly Hill, famed for her two year long treesit in the “Luna” redwood, hold out in the branches in an act of civil disobedience.

As the drama unravels Ripper succeeds in showing the importance of the action in bringing people together and raising consciousness, even if the goals of the action are not directly successful.

Considering the film covers much pain and violence (I'd forgotten quite how awful that Rodney King beating was) its stories are often quietly inspirational. Ripper melds mythology and spiritual practice with a meditative soundtrack and fluid, metaphorical imagery so that it almost washes over you. The Vancouver theatrical release is 15 May.