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ABOUT VELCROW RIPPER
Velcrow Ripper is an award winning filmmaker, writer, media activist, web artist, and sound designer who creates powerful media that address the central issues of our times.
VELCROW RIPPER
In the past 25 years, I’ve directed more than 30 films. My recent feature documentary ScaredSacred premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2004 where it won a Special Jury Prize for “taking audiences on a very personal journey that has universal resonance in a time of uncertainty, and finding hope in moments of despair”.
ScaredSacred is the story of my pilgrimage to the Ground Zeros of the world. I traveled for 5 years searching for stories of transformation in the face of crisis. <<Click here to see the ScaredSacred blogs>> The film went on to play at hundreds of festivals and open theatrically in Canada and Australia. The amount of support I received from individuals all over the world was tremendous. <<Click here to read audience letters>>. ScaredSacred received the Genie, the Canadian Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary, a Hugo Award for the best Social / Political Documentary at the Chicago International Film Festival, and a Wilbur Award for Best Film for Religious Themes in the Secular Media. <<Click here for a full list of Awards for SCAREDSACRED>>.
In 1995, I co-directed Bones of the Forest with long time collaborator Heather Frise. Shot on 16mm over several years, the film documented the blockades and deforestation of the ancient rainforests of Canada through the eyes of Native and Non-Native elders. <<Click here for more about Bones of the Forest>>
In Colombia, the most dangerous country on earth, I filmed In The Company of Fear, a documentary about non-violent resistance to the decades long “dirty war”. For the Golden Gate Award Winning documentary Open Season, I traveled to the remote wilds of British Columbia to film grizzly bears, trophy hunters, and the activists who “hunt the hunters”.
My dramatic films include Leave Me Alone Don’t Ever, an absurdist animation about spiritual materialism, and the feature drama I’m Happy. You’re Happy. We’re all Happy. Happy, happy, happy a film that was described as a Koyaanisqatsi by Monty Python.
As Sound Designer, I have been honoured to work on such important films as The Corporation, A Place Called Chiapas, Eve and the Fire Horse and Culture Jam.
Back in 1995, the Paleolithic era of the web, I designed ScaredScared: Rhizome one of the first artist driven websites to come out of the Banff New Media Institute at the Banff Center for the Arts.
As a teacher, I have lead workshops on Spiritual Activism, Transforming Crisis (featuring Tonglen Meditation and scenes from Scared Sacred) and Media Activism. A co-founder of the Gulf Island Film and Television School (GIFTS) on the west coast of Canada, I’ve taught native youth, street youth and adults to utilize the power of media to tell their own stories; I brought together Canadian and Cuban video artists in Havana and taught Israeli and Palestinian youth to use the creative collaboration of filmmaking as a source of dialogue and understanding.
My role as an artist is to capture and reflect the Zeitgeist of these times, offering clarity, positive solutions, and a spirit of celebration; transmitting the wisdom of the worlds engaged visionaries—many of whom share both my sense of urgency and great possibility. I create transformational and cinematic documentaries, dramatic films, non-fiction books, articles, and web media that deal with the central issues of our times.
I’ve followed my camera wherever it leads me, circling the globe several times, searching for the meaning of life. I’ve discovered that there are as many answers to that question as there are fingerprints, and new answers keep appearing during these times of rapid and dramatic change.
As an insatiable nomadic seeker and media activist, I have watched the dawn of the new millennium with the Dalai Lama in India, occupied dams with the villagers of Thailand, circled the globe with a rescued stray cat named Hara, went underground with the Revolutionary Afghan Women’s Association during the time of the Taliban, danced to techno beats at a solar eclipse rave in Hungary, traded stories with Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant and the Navajo Punk Rock band Blackfire in a cheap hotel in Timbuktu, journeyed to the sound of a Shaman’s drum in Siberia, filmed high speed car chases with British Columbia’s animal rights activists, founded a community cable station in my high school, lived and filmed with Indy Media New York City during 9.11, rode into Mexico City with Subcommandante Marcos and the Zaptista Caravan, prayed with the Hibakusha at dawn in Hiroshima, and had dinner with Thich Nhat Hahn in Vietnam. I soak this stuff up and turn it into art and activism.
Fierce Light is my personal journey into a world that is in the depths of a crisis that is both physical and spiritual, a world that needs to infuse a sense of awe and reverence into all of our interactions with ourselves, each other, and the planet.
Fierce Light is scheduled for festival release fall of 2008.