I am celebrating the hundredth birthday of Cinema with the announcement that my short film The Messenger Hermes Remembers is an official selection of this year's Golden State Film Festival with a screening in Hollywood's famous Chinese Theatre in mid-March. To have a film of mine screened in Hollywood, let alone at Grauman's, has been a lifelong dream, as it probably is a dream of every film maker on this movie-addicted planet.
Cinema, the favorite entertainment of all seven billion people on Earth, is also the most accessible art form ever created. It affords a ready welcome for everyone with a few spare dollars, or a television signal, into the wonders of the world and the profound intricacies of the human mind.
I have been a film-maker all my life. From my first 8mm when I was seven. I came into my own through contact with two immortals of the visual media. The photo-doyen Berenice Abbott (whom I assisted and lived with when I was twenty-three) taught me how to be precise with an image. And Oscar-winning, veteran cinematographer Walter Lassaly (whose friend I became on Crete and as I documented his old age in Master Class with Walter Lassaly) taught me how to make the image move, or rather how to move with the image, how to delineate a single frame into a story.
Both of my wonderful mentors have passed on. I remember them with gratitude every time I shoot a still and in every frame that I intend to use as a component of a movie. They have served me well. I have had success with the documentary on Walter and also with the award-winning Mimetoliths, an exploration of the imagery on the rocks and caves of Crete and the fantasies they weave of ancient gods and extraterrestrial ancestors.
The Messenger Hermes Remembers, now awaiting its North American premiere in March, is a picturesque allegory of the human condition with all its divine alterations, its endless searches for answers. Filmed in Canada, Mexico, Greece, Turkey and India, it tells its story eloquently with words by Borges and a landscape where myth and culture meet.
By the way everyone is invited to see my handmade movie with free popcorn to those who do make it for the screening.
