Filmmakers’ Statement

We make this film in the hope of contributing to a larger, timely conversation about life, mortality and our tentative state of being.  What kind of story encourages a compassionate, interwoven community that itself will encourage understanding of that tentative being?

It is the underlying theme of Acts of Witness that the way of perceiving & telling that has defined the reason for our human journey since, well, the cave no longer provides us with any sustenance of meaning.  The rapid and challenging transformations of our present moment demand a search for other narrative ways to comprehend our travel now.

Much is at risk of being torn apart in the Acts of Witness stories portraying the emotional ambiguities in a particular family feeling its way through a particular death.  As we try to truthfully navigate these ambiguities, Caryn and I allow the film’s way of telling to progressively depart from ordinary representations to let the story spin into more otherworldly realms.  We do this in order to explore life’s separation and change as opportunity even while deeply experiencing the connectivity of love that binds our characters to one another.

Because it is through this connectivity, its pulling apart and stitching back together, that new matter comes into being.  And the new matter of collective and individual consciousness explored and evolved in our stories is, we think, the promise of an engaged, compassionate narrative.