Conversation about the film...

Maria Pearse: We have always dreamt of making an entire film by ourselves. Not for egotistical reasons, but because we felt that only in this way can a totally integrated, meticulous and yet spontaneous work of art emerge. Genuine art is an incredibly individualistic and personal affair, and it seems to me that the more people are involved in one project the greater the chance for a compromise. Gregory Pearse: Yes, for years now we have been repeating the words of Jean Cocteau to each other - I can't remember exactly where he said something like: film will not become an art form until it is as readily available as pen and paper. And it is only in the last few years, due to the developments in digital technology, that the process of filmmaking has become affordable on an individual level. To be able to make a film that comes from the depth of your soul, eliminating the cumbersome machinery of the "film industry" that so often destroys the delicate artistic vision, to be able to create a film on a computer in your own home is a dream come true. M.P.: But this is no "home movie"! It's strange that film is the only medium, where one often hears this type of accusation. Certainly, no one would ever dream of calling Beethoven's Ninth "home music," just because it was composed at home. Or Tolstoy's "War and Peace" - "home literature" because he wrote it at home. Yet a film can be labeled a "home movie", if it doesn't have a sizable budget. That doesn't make any sense. And does it really matter where or how the film was made, so long as its content proves itself to be a genuine work of art?    G.P.: Producing a feature film on your own without the slightest involvement from the "outside" means that the finished product is entirely you, your spirit, your inner world, your pain and suffering, and ultimately your transcendence. It becomes a record of your being, of the time you have spent on earth. In near-death experiences, people often report watching their life play back like in a movie house. The chief difference is that over there the experiencing is total (one lives the image), while here the image is a reflection of the experience...    M.P.: But even that "reflection" can be a powerful experience if it's done right. In other words, if the images come from deep within your being, your soul, then it is possible to create an experience here where one can "live the image." But, of course, the perception of that experience will be different for every human being.    G.P.: Exactly. For example, the first person to see our film happened to be a man, who had just recently lost his father. Since our film deals with matters of death and transcendence of death, he found the film to be enormously compelling and helpful. He was able to inwardly drink in the film as a spiritual experience in and of itself. It became a living thing... We wanted to see if we could make a film, which would speak "heart-to-heart" in the words of Beethoven. This implied a greater emphasis on images rather than on words, and a still greater emphasis on a synergetic combination of images and music - classical music, as the best expression of the striving human spirit. Working more with concepts rather than with plot points, we concentrate on the inner world, so that the plot grows out from within and then naturally unfolds "from the inside out," not "from the outside in". M.P.: Our film is a document, as it were, of our personal spiritual quest (that is why it is subtitled "a spiritual odyssey") and, at the same time, it is an invitation to the viewer to take up his own quest, picking up where we leave off. And we leave the viewer at the end with the dedication of our film to Abd-ru-shin, a very special German spiritual philosopher who lived in a mountain settlement in Tyrol, Austria just before the outbreak of WW II. It was there that he wrote his life's work "In the Light of Truth: the Grail Message". We feel a deep personal connection with him and with his work.