The Power of Short Film

A well made short film is like a poem, it leaves room in it for the unfolding of many different stories.  Vinko Totic, a soft-spoken man who knows first-hand the ravages of civil war has devoted his life to spreading peace and compassion.  When I lived in Ottawa, I knew him best as a organizer of movie and discussion nights which I always found inspiring and thought provoking.  He has now made a deeply moving movie of his own.  His movie has been shortlisted for a CBC contest: Radio Canada International’s The Roots Challenge.

Of his movie, Vinko writes: “This is a story about a personal experience in my village of Janjac, in Bosnia. After the last civil war, I had an opportunity to contemplate the duality of life and death through the illusionary window of an abandoned, and largely destroyed house. That house once belonged to my great uncle and I remember it full of life and excitement. Being in that spot at that time, I consciously chose life over death by looking into the magic of sunlight, the beauty of nature and the village, as well as the simplicity of people’s life.”

You can watch Vinko’s movie (which runs to exactly 7 minutes and 7 seconds) until 8:59 am EST, Thursday the 25th of March at: The Window on Roots.  So hurry up and click on through.

The Tiger Bride: Art, Story and the Wild Mind

The stars–or was it my busy schedule?–finally aligned in such a way that I was able to get to one of Nicola Ryrie‘s story and art workshops at the Salisbury Centre.  February’s story was The Tiger Bride from Angela Carter‘s collection, The Bloody Chamber.  The experience of working with this story through art in the company of a group of people willing to go deeply into it, once more reconfirmed for me the power of story to connect us to each other and to the more-than-human world.

The format of the workshop was deceptively simple.  Nicola, an art therapist, read the first third of the story out loud and then gave us 20 minutes to make something in response to what we’d heard.  She’d brought a treasure trove of supplies: paint, felt, paper, sequins, pipe cleaners, tissue paper, glue, markers, pencil crayons, charcoals etc.  We then displayed and discussed what we’d made.  Though everyone had used different media and chosen to illustrate different elements or scenes,  themes connected our artwork–not themes in the literary sense, themes in the depths of human experience sense.

We did this two more times: Nicola read, we responded through art, and then we discussed our responses.  Nicola further thickened our understandings by bringing in insights from Jungian and shamanistic traditions.  We stayed on an hour after the workshop was supposed to end, too engrossed in our discussion to even think about leaving.

If you know the story, you’ll understand why our conversation turned to environmental matters–to our animal selves and to our relationships with the wild.  If you’re not familiar with the story, go out, find a copy of the book and read it.  There are some things, deep things, that can only be conveyed in a well told story.

Storybikes: Storied Ecotravel through Fife

As often happens with blogs, I got busy with other things and this webpage has sat largely silent for too many months.  During that time I went on a fabulous story journey that I meant to write about but just never managed to.  With spring promised in the returning light, my thoughts have once more returned to ecotravel and to the Storybikes weekend I went on with my husband in the Fall.

Last summer, long-time storyteller and avid cyclist Andy Hunter started up an environmentally-friendly, narratively-informed, tourism business: Storybikes. His goal, to get people to slow down, get out in the fresh-air and re-learn how to see the world through stories.  Storybikes offers a number of different routes in Northern England and Scotland, ranging from weekend to week-long cycling holidays.  The one my husband and I went on followed the trail of Celtic saints around the Kingdom of Fife.

Public transit is fabulous over here and very accommodating of cyclists. On the local train routes, every second car seems to have a bicycle rack, so it was simple enough for us to get ourselves and our bikes out to Kirkcaldy Saturday morning, where we met up with the rest of our group (which included a six-year old who rode on a “tag-a-long” behind her father’s bike and did not complain once).

From the Kirkcaldy train station, Andy took us down to the banks of the Firth of Forth, to Ravenscraig Castle, where we had our first story, this one about the fair Rosabelle St. Clair. We followed the coastline for a wee while to Dysart, where monks used to retreat to their equivalent of the “desert”.  From there we turned inland heading through Thornton and Glenrothes and then over to Vane Farm, one of the Royal Society for the Protection of Bird’s nature reserves.  There were several thousand pink-footed geese in temporary residence in the nature reserve. Every once in a while something would set them off and they would all take off squawking and wheel in a circle before settling down again.

After lunch we took a leisurely cycle around the Loch, stopping for stories about St. Serf and to watch the pirouettes of the local gliders.  Not only is Loch Leven a destination for birds, it is also a highly storied landscape, having two major historical sites: St. Serf’s Inch, or Island, and Loch Leven Castle, one of the many places that Mary Queen of Scots was held prisoner, and from which she eventually escaped.  We spent the night at an inn in Kinross, gathering in the dining room to share some stories before taking our sore muscles to bed.

After a huge Scottish breakfast, the next morning we set out away from Loch Leven up the Cleish Hills, where we took a well earned rest from cycling to hear another tale and then down to Dunfermline, where the tour ended with tales of Saint Margaret.  Andy promised that “through stories, [we would] travel to the heart and history of the landscape” and I feel that he delivered on it.  I highly recommend the concept and Andy’s tours.

Storybikes tours this year include routes in: Dumfries and Galloway, Fife, West Lothian, Perthshire, and along Hadrian’s Wall.