Friends, I've been developing a 'treatment' for the documentary, and I need to include a detailed description of what I'm going to be shooting at each location, who I'm going to be interviewing, and what I'm going to be discussing with them. I want to present a comprehensive overview of the global situation re/ food & hunger...the conditions on the ground, the ecological trends, the energy & water aspects, the economic forces, the sustainable alternatives, the political context, etc. I want people to 'get it' that it's a 'whole system' problem', a consequence of the growth paradigm in a finite world, the nature of our financial systems, etc. Here's one possible shooting scenario. Let's suppose there's an African nation experiencing famine, and at the same time it's exporting cash crops. I'd want to get stories from the ones without food, the ones running the export plantations, a relevant government minister, etc., and I'd want to have a couple charts of land-use patterns and do the math re/ "Could this nation feed itself?", and investigate the question, "Why doesn't it?" Here I could envision very useful interviews with people like Frances Moore Lappé, Michel Chossudovsky, or the fellow who wrote "Economic Hit Man"...we could 'follow the money' to find where the profits end up, etc. One strives in film to get a lot out of each sequence, multiple elements, because there's always so much to say, and so little time. As much as possible, I'm trying to convey the whole gestalt of ETM's Chapter 1, the matrix we live in, with the food-crisis story as a vehicle to illustrate concretely and dramatically the nature of 'the system'. I'd like to tap into our collective experience and collective contacts and see if we can come up with some specific locations, and specific people or groups, to 'tell the story' of food & sustainability in all its dimensions. We want as much geographical and cultural diversity as possible, and each location must have important contributions to make to our unfolding story. From a practical point of view, we want to tell the whole story using as few locations as possible, and focus in on about a half dozen articulate experts / authors who together bring in a broad spectrum of insights. Whenever I've launched into a new project, whether it be a book or a tour or whatever, I've always invited collaboration from you folks. I've been very grateful for the responses that have come in, and the invaluable contributions people have made. We had a saying in our Sufi group, that if you work hard and are on the right path, the universe will come to your assistance. In terms of our collaboration here, I've found that the closer I've been to a 'right path', the more others have wanted to participate, to share in the creative process, to make the project their own and make it better. I believe this documentary is a 'right path' for me at this time. And the universe did indeed help, in the sense that the structure of the film emerged from an intuitive place, with its own energy & DNA, and I didn't begin to understand the full potential of the concept until the structure was nearly fully formed. It was like a surprise gift of just what I wanted but had been afraid to hope for, like my first bicycle. And once again, the gift was a vehicle. hope to hear from you, richard http://cyberjournal.org http://EscapingTheMatrix.org
