I came across this gem of a film yesterday while listening to the ‘Catholic: Under the Hood’ podcast interview with Joe Campo, of Grassroots Films in Brooklyn.  I think the trailer speaks for itself, so I’m just going to post it and let you experience it.

Synopsis:

From Grassroots Films of Brooklyn, New York comes THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE – the story of a band of brothers who travel the world in search of the answers to the burning questions: Who am I? Who is Man? Why do we search for meaning? Their journey brings them into the middle of the lives of the homeless on the streets of New York City, the orphans and disabled children of Peru, and the abandoned lepers in the forests of Ghana, Africa. What the young men discover changes them forever. Through one on one interviews and real life encounters, the brothers are awakened to the beauty of the human person and the resilience of the human spirit.

The film has a premiere here in Cologne tonight, but I won’t be there unfortunately.  Not because I don’t want to, just had other plans.  It’s been translated into German, which I think it great.

The guys at Grassroots Films have been producing short films in the last several years in response to the late Pope John Paul II’s challenge to artists to use their gifts for positive influence and change.

“The film industry’s become the universal medium, exercising a profound influence on the development of people’s attitudes and choices and professing a remarkable ability to influence public opinion and culture across all social and political frontiers.”  —PJP2

His letter in 1999 entitled, “Letter of his holiness Pope John Paul II to Artists,” although lengthy, it is quite a read!  Here’s just an excerpt:

“All artists experience the unbridgeable gap which lies between the work of their hands, however successful it may be, and the dazzling perfection of the beauty glimpsed in the ardour of the creative moment: what they manage to express in their painting, their sculpting, their creating is no more than a glimmer of the splendour which flared for a moment before the eyes of their spirit.

Believers find nothing strange in this: they know that they have had a momentary glimpse of the abyss of light which has its original wellspring in God. Is it in any way surprising that this leaves the spirit overwhelmed as it were, so that it can only stammer in reply? True artists above all are ready to acknowledge their limits and to make their own the words of the Apostle Paul, according to whom “God does not dwell in shrines made by human hands” so that “we ought not to think that the Deity is like gold or silver or stone, a representation by human art and imagination” (Acts 17:24, 29). If the intimate reality of things is always “beyond” the powers of human perception, how much more so is God in the depths of his unfathomable mystery!”

You can read the full text here.  It’s very long, but interesting.

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