Don’t Fear the Ripper
Nothing is sacred in Velcrow Ripper’s film ScaredSacred
BY Charles Demers
Photography by Velcrow Ripper
Nearly a year after its first screening as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival, filmmaker Velcrow Ripper’s ScaredSacred drew a full house to its Vancouver theatrical release this September. Ripper’s film has been a prize-winning darling of the festival circuit, examining the spiritual dimensions of the human response to the world’s sundry “Ground Zeroes”: The Bhopal, India, site of the Union Carbide disaster; Cambodia’s Killing Fields; the European sites of the Holocaust and the First World War; the Afghanistan of the Taliban; New York in the days and weeks following the September 11 attacks; and Israel’s Separation Wall in Palestinian territories.
The film’s technical composition is masterful, self-consciously transcendent. By playing with light, speed and sound, Ripper creates a poetic and visual narrative that coheres around interviews with activists, spiritual leaders, witnesses and others dealing with the enormous trauma radiating from these “Ground Zeroes” around the world. Recurring photos of Buddhist imagery throughout Asia do a great deal to delineate the film’s spiritual (and apolitical) priorities, though the director himself claims a polyreligious spiritualism. Ripper’s narration of the film is delivered in a sort of trance-inducing calm, the Zen-like detachment of which will likely be appreciated by some, even if this reviewer found it grating in its passivity.
Though the technical execution of the picture is largely impeccable, the film’s message of finding spiritual peace in the face of real suffering—the New Age-y exhortation to embrace the invincible “freedom” that each of us has to respond however we choose to the travesties imposed upon us—will be irritating to anyone looking for political analysis. Ripper places his own spiritual journey at the core of the film, centralizing his personal attempts to come to grips with what is essentially the suffering of others. This choice flavours the picture with a solipsism all too common in the “post-politics” world-view of spiritual movements.
ScaredSacred’s Vancouver release paired with the launch of the Ground Zero Awareness Campaign, a campaign intended to use tragedy as a catalyst for change. This twinning amplified the attention—and controversy—surrounding the film. At screenings over the weekend of September 11, 2005, organizers had slated such speakers as author Joy Kogawa, Rabbi David Mivasair and several members of Poets Against War to address the audiences. Some, however, felt that speakers from the Creative Peace Network chosen to address the issue of Palestine-Israel were selected because other Palestinian rights groups in the city had insisted that they would address the political context of the conflict rather than its “spiritual” dimension.
Wendy Alnuweiri, a member of the Palestine Solidarity Group as well as the Wall Must Fall campaign, pointed out that the two groups were approached by organizers to speak at the screenings and then were dropped once these political concerns were raised. In an email to Ripper, Alnuweiri asked, “Is there any genuine interest in the community’s thoughts and comments, or is this a publicity stunt? …We hope that the campaign’s desire for community outreach is more genuine than just having an Arab-named speaker…”
Asked to comment on the issue, Ripper said by email that “If the opening weekend had some imbalance to it, if certain groups felt underrepresented, I apologize, and I hope that in future campaigns we can work with the community to rectify that. We need to work together if we want to see change happen.”
ScaredSacred will continue to tour theatres across Canada through November and December.
