Here’s an interesting website, called Elevate Hollywood, and subtitled “Connecting and Catalyzing Conscious Creatives.” Its mission statement says, “Though our home base is Downtown Los Angeles, our mission is global.” The website is a place for film-industry folk with eternity on their minds, to collect and disseminate information about projects that aim to do a little more than simply entertain. The film described here is The Invocation: A Documentary about God and for World Peace, the first of a trilogy of films on world peace that are planned by writer/director Emmanuel Itier. It includes mini-interviews with a great many teachers, scholars, and spiritual leaders, including Sandra Ingerman, who says,
The theme is how bringing back the principles of divinity and oneness can create peace on the planet… I think the film is wonderful and has a powerful message.
Last December, Emmanuel Itier commented that Sharon Stone had finished recording the final narration. The film is scheduled for release in mid-2010, and we hear it’s been accepted for this year’s Santa Fe Film Festival. At the last year’s Palm Beach International Film Festival, Itier had screened the trailer. Sandy Mandelberger, Festival Dailies editor for Fest21.com, wrote:
Also entertaining an international focus is The Invocation, an exploration of the notion of the meaning of God and the goal of world peace… By speaking to religious, educational, political and artistic leaders (including Oliver Stone, Deepak Chopra, Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama), Itier finds the common thread amongst people striving for a better world and a closer relationship with the eternal.
Of all the art forms, film is the most collaborative, and the one that that most requires community effort. Even a movie with few actors and a limited set needs a huge crew of technicians and other support staff to make it happen. If all goes well, and each one of the thousands of details obligingly clicks into place, there will hopefully be a synergistic effect. That means that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and the final effect is much greater than could have been expected, even after all those individual efforts and contributions were added together.
In How to Thrive in Changing Times, Sandra writes about a concept she calls the “magical child,” which is the extra share of energy that arises from working within community. She cites the Bible, specifically chapter 18, verse 20 in the Gospel of Matthew, that famous quotation from Jesus where he says, “When two or three are gathered in my name, I am among you.” The magical child is the offspring of the coming together of collective spiritual energies to gestate something holy. Or, to put it yet another way, as Sandra does in the book,
When two or more spiritual energies come together, their union generates a third energy that, if correctly focused, can be what I call the magical child — the energy of change, transformation, and healing.
Speaking of which, here’s another media community with real synergistic potential. It’s an advocacy journalism collective called Manifest Positivity, whose purpose is to transparently use any possible form of media and social networking to advance public service projects and community organizing. In general, the object is to change the world, especially in such specific areas as adoption, alternative transportation, animal rescue, environmentally conscious living, alternative healing, conflict resolution, secular spirituality, and peaceful revolution.
Source: “The Invocation,” 12/30/09
Source: “Documentaries Lift Palm Beach FF,” 04/26/09
Source: “Manifest Positivity Collaborators FAQ,” Manifest Positivity, 02/02/10
Source: “How to Thrive in Changing Times,” Amazon.com
Image by alicepopkorn, used under its Creative Commons license.
