We had a great premiere weekend for ENTANGLED MINDS! It felt like audiences really got the film's intended message through the experience it creates. We also won our first two awards: Best NH Feature Documentary at New Hampshire Film Festival (including 20-pound granite award!) and Best Transpersonal Documentary at The Psychedelic Film and Music Festival in New York.
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Our new film Entangled Minds will have its world premiere on October 16 and 18 at the New Hampshire Film Festival in Portsmouth, with an additional screening on October 17 at the Psychedelic Film & Music Festival in New York City. I will be present for Q&As at both festivals and will also participate in a panel discussion, "The State of the Art of Documentary Filmmaking," at NHFF.
Synopsis: Confronted with the limitations of Western medicine, four people seek relief from physical and mental pain through treatments that induce altered states of consciousness. Grounded in deep meditation, their interconnected experiences with hypnosis, flotation therapy, music-induced trance, and sacred plant medicine bring the viewer on a transformative journey of healing from within.
The film is 79 minutes long and you can view the trailer here.
We're currently booking screenings at film festivals, universities and medical schools, meditation centers, brain and spinal cord injury organizations, and community groups focused on chronic pain and mental health. Please reach out if you are interested in bringing the film to your community – and stay in touch via Instagram or our Entangled Minds newsletter!
The Colorado Division of Youth Services (DYS) will soon be using CIRCLE UP across all 10 of its secure youth residential centers, incorporating the film into its work with young people around accountability, the impact of their actions, and envisioning a positive future.
After Programming Administrator Jason Dagg facilitated meaningful circles around the film at three DYS sites, the response was immediate: young people wanted more.
“We delivered the CIRCLE UP curriculum to the young men in our system through a series of five sessions, delivered once a week for five weeks,” Jason writes. “So far we have delivered this at three separate program sites, and each site has had youth provide promising feedback.”
For one young man, the themes of the film moved from the screen into his own life.
At a parole hearing shortly after watching the film and participating in a circle, a family member of the person he had shot spoke. She told him, “I just really want you to find success in your life. I hope for you to do well.”
Later, Jason asked how he felt about what she had said. His response was striking:
“Man, I can’t believe it’s like the film we watched…now I have a responsibility.
In that moment, the young man recognized something that CIRCLE UP is designed to make possible: accountability can become the beginning of a different relationship with harm one has caused, the people affected, and the responsibility to make different choices moving forward.
As Jason reflected, the experience from the film had become real for this young man. Because he had already explored those ideas in the circle, the experience connected with values he was beginning to carry with him as he prepared to transition back into the community.
This is why we made CIRCLE UP: to create spaces where difficult truths can be faced, empathy can emerge, and young people can begin to see accountability and hope as part of their own journeys.
(image: Spring Creek Youth Services Center, Colorado)
In honor of National Voter Education Week, our short film The Battle for Ranked Choice Voting will be featured at a special virtual Community Documentary Night on October 4, from 7-9pm ET. I will participate in a Q&A with the film's producer, Scotty Vercoe; RCV advocate Kyle Bailey; and former Massachusetts state representative Nika Elugardo.
Synopsis: From Maine to New Mexico, citizens across the country are working to bring ranked choice voting (RCV) to their communities. The film follows voters as they organize for the reform and encounter opposition from political leaders, tracing the historical rise, fall, and resurgence of RCV in the United States and abroad. The Battle for Ranked Choice Voting puts viewers on the front lines of a national debate over how we conduct elections. (16 minutes, 2018)
You can sign up for the virtual discussion here, and watch the film beforehand at this link.
The Asian American International Film Festival will screen Heaven Rain Flows Sweetly, a film I co-produced and story consulted with director Shasha Li and producer Xin Li, on August 8 in New York City; Mimesis Festival will screen it on August 17 in Boulder, Colorado, and make it available to stream online from August 14-25.
Shasha grew up partly in Kunming, China, where my mother was born. We met through a mutual friend, and it was delightful to collaborate on her first professional film. I am moved by how the film's poetic imagery and narration seek to understand the ecospiritist worldview of Shasha's Nakhi relatives.
The film premiered at DocNYC in November and has also screened at VC Filmfest; it will show at the Native Spirit Film Festival in London October 11-19.
