BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

"Scared Sacred: Unwrap the Darkness. Reveal the Light" is one of those rare personal journey documentaries that spiritually awakens the viewer.

We compare it to our bestelling premium, "Orwell Rolls," which sold more than 3,000 copies on BuzzFlash.com.

"Orwell Rolls" was a compelling personal exploration by Robert Pappas into the hijacking of news and information by media conglomerates.

The uniquely named Canadian filmmaker, Velcrow Ripper, takes a different path than Pappas, as he spends a five-year pilgrimage to many of the sites of human disaster in recent history: Bhopal, Cambodia, Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Post 9-11 New York, and Hiroshima.

Far from being a downbeat film, the director seeks to find compelling signs of human hope and endurance amidst loss and despair. In this effort, he provides moving evidence and testimony of the human ability to fight back and survive in even the most horrible of circumstances.

To our surprise, "Scared Sacred" is not filled with horrifying images. Rather it offers a cinematic landscape of powerful interviews and visual footage that touches the soul.

Ripper weaves the various stops of his journey together with a straightforward account of his quest to try to understand the dual nature of being human: horrifying acts followed by uplifting healing.

The quality of the visuals match the power of this odyssey to the "ground zeros" of devastation.

An unexpectedly moving and compelling film that is a tonic for all of us who are bewildered by the dark side of humanity.

"Scared Sacred" lets the light shine through.

To provide just some sense of the tone of the film, think of watching children playing and laughing in the decaying ruins of the Khmer Rouge death houses. Life has a way of returning to even the sites of the most unspeakable horrors.

Or an activist in Bhopal who is committed to providing medical care for those who survived the Union Carbide pesticide leak that killed and injured thousands of peoples. These people are undesirables, he tells the director, because they are not part of the globalized economic community: they neither work in sweatshops for slave wages or consume goods in large quantities. They are irrelevant to the marketplace, and thus expendable.

But to this Indian activist, they are not expendable. They are human beings, entitled to the rights of all those who are born onto this planet.

Ripper even manages to travel into the thicket of Israeli-Palestinian conflict without judgement of either side. Instead, he focuses on parents of Israelis and Palestinians who died needlessly. Together, this group of mourning parents has become dedicated to seeking peace between the two peoples.

It is so rare to find a movie -- or anything -- that can somehow provide us with hope.

"Scared Sacred" does that in the most sensitive, personal and compelling of ways.



BUZZFLASH REVIEWS