My Film: The Rag King’s Opus
I believe film is an extremely powerful medium. Film can bring a lesson from our collective human history front and center for a few precious hours in a person’s life. The audience has the opportunity to live through the character’s on the screen and in essence learn their life lesson’s the easy way.
My film is made for the family, children to preteen audience, kids who don’t yet have independence but do have the power to think and learn. Children have always been one of the most vulnerable members of society. One very recent example of this is in the atrocities of Jonestown. Nine-hundred and nine people died in one fateful day and of those people 294 of them were children, human beings that are dependent on their parents for their shelter and safety.
The adults whose fate led them to Jonestown were living in a time in American History where the depression was so severe that people desperately needed, arguably the most important commodity of survival, hope. To find such a precious value they left reason behind for those who promised to give such a treasure. Jim Jones provided that hope, Adolph Hitler also provided that hope, and so many other false leaders of history. This is a collective problem that humanity never ceases to face in times of sorrow. My film is a dark children’s fantasy. It pits two siblings against a Jim Jones-type force who has taken their parents minds and spirits. This film’s message is to show children that, as we seem to be heading towards a depression, they do have the power to judge between right and wrong and look out for their parents.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-quotation on placard over Jim Jones’ rostrum at Jonestown
It is important to not hide children from the realities of the world, because that could inevitably cost them their lives. In my film I begin to open up this awareness and continue to do so in a book (part I of a series) that I am writing as a prequel to the film that follows a mystic inventive scientist through his adventures as he has lives in different eras of time and begins to crack the code of life. I am writing this as a series of books in the same vein as harry potter that will carry the reader on an exciting journey of the mind and the spirit of joy that inevitably makes the scientist the winner in the end.