At 15, as he sat in an algebra math class watching his teacher demonstrate an equation, Emmanuel Itier converted the numbers to words in his head that formed a poem. That night he had a dream about the poem that gave birth to his existential script, The Cage, about a man’s mid-life crisis. He thought to himself that he should turn it into a film and recruited a few friends, one of whom had a video camera to shoot the short film in 24 hours. He showed the dark film with lots of blood to his father who was a doctor and mother, a teacher. After watching it they said “Emmanuel, you’re very creative and it looks like you won’t become a doctor or teacher, so go do what you are called to do.”

After The Cage, Emmanuel produced a few other short films and upon graduating high school he spent a week in film class at a local college in Paris and immediately sensed he could do better on his own. He left and got a job in sales for a cable company while simultaneously interning for production companies.

About this time, he met an American flight attendant, a relationship developed and they were married and moved to US in 1988. Upon arriving in Hollywood, Emmanuel spoke no English, nor had he any real credentials ,so he did odd jobs until he began teaching French to Hollywood film executives one of whom, Peter Hoffman, the CFO of Carolco, the production company responsible for Rambo, Basic Instinct and other action films, befriended and mentored him. He learned the ropes by observing and reading scripts and self-trained to become a producer. During his teaching days, a Paris friend contacted him and asked if would like to be a US correspondent for a French film magazine to which he said yes.

Emmanuel went on to produce ten films and direct three, many of which were low budget horror films made because the Hollywood financiers were essentially “unconscious, making films for unconscious audiences”.

After ten years, Emmanuel remarried, had his first child, and had a second revelation. He heard a voice say “You need to do something with your life”

A few minutes later, the idea of oneness popped into his mind and his first conscious film, Invocation was born. Invocation answers the question, “What’s the meaning of existence?” In his mind, Emmanuel heard narration by Sharon Stone and pursued her for 3 years. When they finally met, she read the script and told him that the film was very important and should be seen by every member of Congress and screened at the Smithsonian. When he told her he had no money left, she told him that was not a problem and that she would be honored to narrate. She became the Executive Producer and will share in any profits.

The film has been screened at twenty festivals winning six awards and has received great feedback from luminaries including director Oliver Stone and Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu both of whom appear in the film.

While watching his engaging and important film, I was taken on an journey through the minds of a wonderful group of people from many walks of life who illuminated many areas of great interest to me and NPD readers including peace, mystery, awakening, the material and spiritual, science and religion, consciousness and non-locality, I and We, and silence.

Among the many powerful quotes in the film is this one: The terrorism of the strong brings about the terrorism of the weak. And it’s opposite may well be true. The peacefulness of the strong could bring about the peacefulness of the weak. It’s an idea whose time has come. The underlying message of this film is that we must come to see the divine everywhere and in everyone we see for we and life are one seamless whole however it may look and we may then, finally, realize the peace we seek in ourselves and the world.

Photos are Emannuel with Puppet Ji, Desmond Tutu and Sharon Stone.

“So far, we haven’t come far in solving our deeper cultural problems but we can do a lot”, says Itier, if, we focus on action rather than what’s wrong. The way I see it, humanity is not failing but is rather reinventing itself. There’s been far too much talking and thinking. Many more of us need to put the idea of peace into action and actually become it.

What took place historically is what Emmanuel calls the “castration of the feminine” by and in the masculine. “For the past 10,000 years. we have been the victims of a controlling masculine dominated system that directed women away from their power and positions of power and, at the same time, also killed the feminine in the head and hearts of men and turned them into killers rather than lovers

To help reconcile this dangerous historical split, Emmanuel is completing production of his next film, Femme: Women Healing the World featuring visionaries including Nobel Peace Prize Winners Shirin Ebadi and Mairead Maguire and modern day visionaries Barbara Marx Hubbard, Riane Eisler, Jean Houston, Jean Shinoda Bolen, and Marianne Williamson. And, Yoko Ono contributed a song for the film.

“Today”, Emmanuel says, “we have a group of serial killers and psychopaths in charge of the planet. A re-balancing is underway, so I have been called to produce my trilogy of Invocation, Femme and the last, We Come in Peace: A Re-Evolution of Economics and Politics that integrates the themes of oneness and the reunion of the feminine and masculine in all of us and applies this union to a vision of a transcended economics and politics in action.

Emmanuel is a man on a passionate mission of peace and film is his vehicle of love. I look forward to reviewing Femme and Come in Peace for NPD the minute they become available. Should you wish to support the making of his next two films, please contact Emmanuel through his production company’s website http://www.redefinegod.com or at wl1@cox.net.

by Keith Goetzman from the Ecologist

I watch a lot of environmental documentary films, and it’s usually quite clear whose “side” the filmmaker is on—the same one as me, of course. In one sense, this is perfectly understandable: Powerful people and institutions that trash the environment are more likely to use lobbyists, front groups, and PR wizards, not earnest documentaries, to spread their views. Big Coal, Big Oil, and Big Timber take their agenda straight to the halls of power, not to art houses and film fests.

The unfortunate result is that environmental documentary genre can be ripe for groupthink and complacency, and occasionally I find myself refreshed to see a doc that forces viewers to challenge their own preconceptions and opinions. If a Tree Falls, currently playing in theaters, is one such film. It follows the case of Daniel McGowan, a former Earth Liberation Front (ELF) member who is serving a seven-year sentence on federal terrorism charges for his role in two arsons, one at a logging firm and another at a facility that activists falsely believed was growing genetically engineered trees. No one was injured or killed in the arsons, yet the government pursued this “eco-terrorism” case as vigorously as it goes after Islamic militant cells that have openly stated their murderous intentions.

McGowan gets plenty of screen time, and he comes off as an amiable and articulate nonviolent activist caught up in the draconian anti-terrorism laws of post-9/11 America. But filmmaker Marshall Curry also talks to the owner of the burned-down logging company, the law enforcers who nabbed McGowan, and McGowan’s hard-bitten Irish cop father, who shares few of his son’s radical views. Curry also interviews green activists who became government informants against their peers in order to save their own skins. The end product is a well-rounded portrait that humanizes McGowan without excusing his more extreme actions or painting him as a flawless hero. The notable thing is that the film also humanizes his fellow activists, his parents, and his legal foes, acknowledging that conflicting opinions and emotions come with this complicated territory. Not everything is as clear-cut as the wilderness that McGowan is so committed to saving.

The British environmental magazine The Ecologist has an interview with Marshall Curry that explains a bit about how this remarkable and moving film came together. For starters, he basically happened across his subject: Curry’s wife works at the office where McGowan was arrested.

As Curry tells The Ecologist, “I actually didn’t know anything about the ELF beside very cursory things I’d seen on TV. My wife runs a domestic violence organization in Brooklyn and came home from work one day and told me that four federal agents had walked in to her office and arrested one of her employees. It was Daniel McGowan—I knew him a bit, he was the opposite of someone who’d be facing life in prison for domestic terrorism would look or act like. I was interested and decided to jump in.”

Curry’s fair-mindedness ultimately does a great service to his film, to judge from the reactions he’s gotten. He says, “When you work on something in an edit room with just a couple of other people, you never know how it is going to be received. It was really important to us that it reflect the complexities of the case. We’ve been happy to see that the prosecutor, the detective, and the police captain—they’ve all seen it and feel like it’s an important and accurate story. Similarly, Daniel’s family and the spokesman for the ELF say the same thing.”

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