The Williams Lake Film Club will present its next film Heart of Sky - Heart of Earth this coming Tuesday, Oct. 7, at 7 p.m. at the Gibraltar Room.
Frauke Sandig and Eric Black, the German director and her partner, lived with a group of Maya in their communities and culture for a couple of years while making this documentary. There is no narrator, she lets the people talk.
The language is Maya and Spanish, with English subtitles, 98 minutes and rated 14-plus.
Featured at more than 100 international film festivals including every Central and South American Human Rights film festival, Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth follows six young Maya in Guatemala and Chiapas through their daily and ceremonial life.
They put forth a wholly indigenous Mayan perspective in their own words, without narration.
Their cosmology, in which all life is sacred and interconnected, presents a deeply compelling alternative to the prevailing ruling worldview.
As giant corporations go to the ends of the earth to extract all resources, these Maya reveal their determination to resist the destruction of their culture and environment. They believe they are the guardians of the earth.
Each of their stories touches upon a facet of the current global crisis and upon a facet of their spiritual legends.
Beautifully filmed, the intimate accounts of the protagonists interweave with images associated with the fragile beauty of nature and the creation myth of the Popol Vuh. Ruins of a former Mayan civilization stand in the background as harbingers of our own possible fate.
However, they do not tell us that we are facing the end but that we are entering a new phase ... their interpretation of their calendar is full of hope!
This film received five star ratings in Germany and many other places in Europe and South America.
Have you heard about it? Probably not. The director Frauke Sandig has personally sent us a copy from Berlin in Germany.
She was quite excited that we wanted to see her film right here in Williams Lake, and she really got a kick out of us being in the heart of the Cariboo-Chilcotin.
That sounded just too exotic to her.
Please do not miss this film. As Allen J. Christenson, Professor of Humanities at Brigham Young University, said: “An exquisitely, achingly beautiful film, wonderfully conceived and sensitively filmed.”
Back doors to the Gibraltar Room in the Cariboo Memorial Complex open at 6:30 pm. Oct. 7.
Admission is $9 regular, $8 for Film Club members, and $6 for seniors/elders and students, TRU and high school.