Everyday Activist - The Vision Within (MLJFF 2015)

Posted on Thursday, November 05, 2015 at 03:00 PM

The Vision Within

Movie Review by Everyday Activist X CalgaryMovies.com

I spend a lot of time up north in the Yukon working. Their education system is quite different from anything I’ve seen in Alberta, save some outdoor education options and special forest schools. They have their students actively involved in activities such as hiking, camping, kayaking, canoeing and of course, outdoor survival skills. For one exercise they had to use the forest to feed themselves, which is a great skill to have, given many people up there live in cabins without running water or furnaces. If you get a chance, the movie All the Time in the World, which didn’t get chosen for the Marda Loop Justice Film Festival 2015, shows exactly what I mean. With this type of education, young people - the hope for the future, appreciate the natural world rather than using it as a commodity for endless consumption.

The Vision Within takes university students to a remote village in the Amazon rainforest to help them understand the value of unplugging from the modern world, as well as the value of indigenous knowledge. For the indigenous people, by inviting students to come visit their remote village, they hope people will care about the rainforest enough to help them protect it from oil exploration. The film focused on the concept of finding knowledge within each person, in order to make the changes necessary for a better world. Back at home, the students delivered. They had formed a club to inform people about using a smaller carbon footprint and designed a garden on campus. 

One of the issues that they talk about briefly is the reintroduction to society after being isolated. Myself having recently been to remote villages in the Andes, Peru setting up solar panels for basic lighting systems and then coming to a tourist Mecca like Cusco, culture "shock" is not the appropriate word. It’s more like cultural whiplash. You are conscious of what’s going on, but yesterday you were in the middle of nowhere with people who don’t have lights and today you’re bombarded with people who speak English and pander to your western sensibilities. The effects last longer than shock and it’s not something you readily dismiss, even when you come home.

Our guides on the tourist portion of our trip were impressed we had been to the parts of Peru that were “straight out of National Geographic”. I understand what those students experienced. In some ways they are uniquely qualified to have such things happen to them, because they haven’t bought into what a “job” looks like, so they can use their gift of youth to push boundaries and explore. Both my volun-tour trips to Cuba in 2013 and Peru in 2015 were confidently led by people in their mid-twenties, deeply loving their projects and wanting to help. 

The Vision Within will screen at the Marda Loop Justice Film Festival 2015 on Friday, November 20th at 9:15 PM. Native Elder Bob Beazley with Ghost River Rediscovery discuss with the audience his views on the value of indigenous ways in a modern world.

Calgary Showtimes: The Vision Within >