I also recently saw a film at SIFF (Seattle International Film Festival) called The Last Train Home that I highly recommend that shares a window into modern life in China that spans youth and transportation and urban – rural divide and so much more.

On a totally unrelated side note, I found this amazing. Just after finishing this blog post, I was looking for an image from the radio story above to include in the post which I’d just published on my blog. Literally 1 minute later, I went to Google and searched for ‘Tiger V Dragon BBC’ and check the results

This is the piece

Challenging The Stigma of Disability in Nepal from Pangeality Productions on Vimeo.

So using an air spade to blow out vertical holes and a giant sucker truck to take the dirt away, a number of 4 ft deep vertical columns were dug around the base of the tree, and filled with fresh compost donated by Cedar Grove. Better irrigation and gas flow to the roots was the goal to supplement the pruning they’d already done.

Here is the video I produced about the work.

From Aurora Ave N. to Downtown

Sequoia on Aurora before being transplanted, 1972

Placing the tree downtown at 4th and Stewart, Seattle

Of particular interest to me and one reason why I blog about this here, is because it’s a very different though complimentary angle to a documentary I shot in 2005 in Lagos Nigeria, called The Digital Dump. In that piece, we exposed the underbelly of the global electronics waste trade, and how Africa was receiving the majority of the toxic trash that is a byproduct of our insatiable appetite for new consumer electronics, and how the toxics inside of them leach into the water table, are burned and melted to salvage copper and other valuable residuals, and are an overall environmental nightmare for the poor countries around the globe receiving the waste.

So on the front and the back end here, it’s an important reminder to again be asking ourselves what the consequences of our purchases are, where they are coming from, how they were produced, and what will happen to them when we are done with them, be it food, energy, or electronics.

The Digital Dump was produced by The Basel Action Network, a Seattle based NGO at the forefront of the global waste trade crisis. The film has been screened at film festivals around the world, at the UN, at many industrial trade conferences, and wrote about in the NYT, WSJ, and seen on PBS, 20/20 and many other media outlets around the world. The parody video was produced by The Enough Project, an anti-genocide organization doing very important work.

*In a rare blog post in response to the Kristof article, Steve Jobs of Apple claims that “We require all of our suppliers to certify in writing that they use conflict free materials. But honestly there is no way for them to be sure. Until someone invents a way to chemically trace minerals from the source mine, it’s a very difficult problem.”

A few months back while working on a story for Cedar Grove Composting at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show at The Washington Convention Center, I was following the food and beverage manager around the facility and filming while she talked about all the great food scrap and waste product composting they were doing there. When she lead me through the industrial kitchen, I saw people from all over the world working there, immigrants who didn’t all speak english but seemed happy in their work environment, and it occurred to me that perhaps this was a place where some of the Bhutanese Refugees I’d filmed in my story about their relocation to here in Seattle’s Rainier Valley, could also work.  So after checking with Cedar Grove to clarify that was an appropriate way to communicate with the Convention Center, I floated the idea, and the woman taking me on the tour was fine with it.

So here, a few months later, I was back at the Convention Center with a group of 10 refugees who have now been hired as part time workers there, washing dishes and doing other basic kitchen work.  To my surprise, it took about 5 hours of me translating and handholding to get all the paper work filled out together with a brief orientation around everything from getting uniforms to how to enter the building and what to expect when they showed up for their first shifts tomorrow. Taking so long wasn’t a big deal for me as it felt great to see some of these refugees so excited to be getting some actual work.  Arriving in America over the last 2 years with our economy in shambles, it’s been a very tough time to find work and for almost all of them it will be their first actual employment here in America.  They’ll be making the WA state minimum wage of $8.55/hr and some of them will be working the night shift from 10PM – 6 AM but overall they were incredibly excited and very grateful for the opportunity I’d facilitated for them.

Of the ten of them, there were 2 sisters, 2 brothers, one husband and wife and their 2 sons and daughter in law, ranging in age from 19-mid 50’s and best of all, the father featured in the piece I produced about their resettlement. He’s been here for 2 years now and with no language or work skills, he’s been very bored and unengaged in little more than going to ESL classes that are slow and frustrating and taking care of his young grandson, but little positive engagement with the outside world because of his limited language skills.  So he was very excited and couldn’t stop telling me how much it meant to him.  Also, I was very pleasantly surprised by how positive and supportive the staff getting them all signed up were, from the HR manager to the head chef (who had been to and loved Nepal as a tourist and knew how lovely Nepali people were), they were patient and joyful and overall really ready to give these folks a chance which is exactly what they need. Unfortunately the work is not full time but hopefully once they get a chance to prove themselves and the economy picks up, that there’ll be opportunities for more long term employment. My hope is that over time, this venue will have positions for more Bhutanese Refugees.

Here is the piece I produced about composting food scraps at the Convention Center http://vimeo.com/10096783

Here is the piece about the resettlement of Bhutanese Refugees from camps in Nepal to Seattle’s Rainier Valley http://vimeo.com/7260916

This week I saw the incredible Chinese documentary  The Last Train Home, the story of the Chinese New Year and the nationwide exodus of hundreds of millions of migrant workers going home for the holiday, the only time all year many will see their families. The film follows one particular family over the course of a few years, including their jobs and living situation at their factory, back home in the rural village where they left behind 2 children being raised by their grandparents, and on the move among the masses in brutal train station crowds and regional transportation as they head across China. The film is incredibly real and present in the people’s lives and the relationships including the struggle with their now teenage children.

Also, the The Pat Tillman Story A scathing exposé of the height of American war propaganda in Iraq & Afghanistan,  incredibly shocking. Pat Tillman was the NFL star who left his football career to join the Army Rangers, who’s death was manipulated at the highest levels of government as a war time propaganda tool that was really a big lie that was only exposed as his activist mother uncovers the truth behind what really happened with the other soldiers in his unit. From the SIFF website:

Fiction: Tillman was killed in action in Afghanistan following the rescue of dozens of his fellow soldiers from an enemy ambush. Fact: He was killed by friendly fire by members of his own unit as they shot indiscriminately at Tillman, believing him to be a guerilla fighter. The grave discrepancy between fact and fiction furthers growing suspicions of American media involvement in covering up the atrocities of the Bush administration, Gulf War generals, and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. As the film unfolds, the realities of Tillman’s service and death prove to be much more profound and important than any manufactured image of the unwavering American hero.

And Hipsters A crazy musical set in 1955 Moscow, with young Hipsters  flaunting their mad style in an era of gray Soviet military domination of no art and no color and style. Gorgeous colors and lighting with awesome music and dancing.My guess is that this film will be out in theaters as it was beautifully crafted and an incredible window into life in Russia at the time. Watch the trailer.

The pass also enables me to participate in the Filmmakers Forums & Digital Media Lab classes that they’re teaching at The Seattle Center this weekend which I’m going to hit up on Sunday and am looking forward to.

So Pete and Dylan came over to my studio one day to discuss the arrangement and the next week I was out with them on Puget Sound filming them fishing for salmon one fall night. Floating in Elliot Bay on a gorgeously clear late September afternoon into the evening, over a few beers and some salmon bellies, it came out that Dylan and I were both Pitzer College graduates which was another positive layer in the relationship. It was the first time I’d been on a boat in Puget Sound and also my first time on a small commercial fishing boat and it was wild.  We left Fishermen’s Terminal which Pete’s been fighting to preserve (discussed in the piece) around 4pm and returned some time around 3 AM, picking up Dylan along the way at Shilshole Bay Marina.  It was a great night.

Months later, I connected with Pete and Dylan who were on vacation together in Kathmandu at the same time I was there filming  stories for the Seattle Channel connecting Seattle and Nepal.  We had some great dinner with a Nepali father and son with deep connections to Pitzer, Nepali archeologist and scholar Mukunda Aryal and his son Trailokya who went to Pitzer as well. With The Seattle Channel’s focus on telling local green stories, profiling Loki in this piece was an easy choice, with a long history of local involvement, keen insight into regional environmental issues related to the ocean and beyond, and much more as Pete is also an anthropology professor at Seattle Central Community College (great link to how Pete’s students feel about his classes). So the piece uses some of the material I shot back working on the profiles for the Loki website combined with some new interview footage with Pete and archival footage from BJ Bullert’s 2001 documentary about the struggle for Fishermen’s Terminal. It’s a solid piece, nice mix of profile, insight, and inspiration. It was also great to work again with Penny Legate who wrote and reported the piece. You can find Loki selling at the University District, Columbia City, and West Seattle farmer’s markets or online at LokiFish.com or watch 11 more videos about their business on their Vimeo channel.

Dining in Kathmandu w/ the Knutsons of Loki Fish, the Aryals of Nepali Intelligencia, and Steve Brothers of Himalayan Mercantile/BMX Society

Thanks to a connection from my friend Sheri Herndon, I was able to work as a freelance cameraman for the day with Odyssey Networks, a video production company out of New York City that’s the largest interfaith media company in America. They are actively developing a mobile phone application that will share videos about compassion, interfaith dialogue, religion, spirituality, meditation, prayer and much more. Their goal is that people will be able to enjoy short videos of world thought leaders as they ride buses, wait on line at the supermarket, or wherever they may be.

Over the course of the day, as speakers came off stage, we filmed interviews in various parts of The Center for Spiritual Living campus.  Interviews included the self described Interfaith Amigos – a rabbi, imam and priest who travel the country together promoting interfaith dialogue and understanding, with Richard Conlin, the Seattle City Council president on hand to sign the charter, James O’Dea (the former Executive Director of Amnesty International), the boy who stood next to Barack Obama as he signed the Health Care Reform Bill (a Seattleite from the Rainier Valley!), Karen Armstrong, Courtney Martin (The Secret Society of Creative Philanthropy), and various reverends, authors, and activists.

They each talked about their understanding of the concept of compassion, their motivations and experiences with conflict and therapy and peace and love and community.  Very positive stuff.  What I particularly appreciated was the spectrum of experience, and the way in which each of them talked about the work they did, in terms of where they saw change coming from, and the greatest obstacles to worldwide policy initiation toward greater compassion.

It was a great day. Made me proud to be a Seattleite.  All of Odyssey Network’s content is open source so stay tuned, I’ll be posting as many of the interviews as possible as they become available.