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City of Dreamers: singing of love and new beginnings

March 20, 2012 By

Dreamers sing of love and new beginnings in City of Dreamers, a musical odyssey through funky Brighton, England. Jamie Patterson directs.

City of Dreamers is nominated for Best Feature Film at the Madrid International Film Festival, and is scheduled at SENE Film Music & Arts Festival, Vegas Indie Film Fest and the World Music and Independent Film Festival.

Dream aloud

Your whole life lies before you. Possibilities seem infinite. There are new places to go, new people to meet. City of Dreamers brings that moment alive.

Doubt and heartache don’t eclipse this sweet film. The players are troubadours recalling their lives and loves. The exciting soundtrack includes songs by Ellen and the Echo, The Black Fields and Tom Staniford.

Cosgrove’s great performance

City of Dreamers is about the possible. Rose (Ellen Cosgrove, Ellen and the Echo’s lead singer in her impressive film debut) is just arriving in Brighton. She doesn’t know a soul.

Clutching her guitar and the address of a rooming house, Rose meets odd and barely dressed Kyle (George Webster, zany yet moving). Cosgrove keeps it real and direct. Her graceful and nuanced performance makes you care.

Lose yourself to find yourself

Rose leaves everything she knows for a fresh start. All she needs is her guitar and her songs. Still figuring out who she is, she meets other dreamers and singers.

Joe (Eddy Brimson, warm and memorable) is homeless after losing his wife and daughter. Harry (Ross Scarfield) works as a bartender at a local pub. Nicole (Amanda Piery) asks Rose for help with a budding romance. Carlos (Diego Alcacer), a world traveler at the launderette, quips: “Exciting, isn’t it? Life.”

By the end of City of Dreamers, romances bloom. The search for love is bound to our inner lives. “The only person we truly love is ourselves,” Rose tells Carlos.

Achieve all you believe

Produced by Brighton’s up-and-coming Jump Start Productions, City of Dreamers dares to be positive.

“We wanted to incorporate the essence of Brighton,” producer and director of photography Nathalie Holman told The Argus.  “Brighton is well known for its arts, culture and music scene, but not when you look at the films about it.”

This story could unfold in many world cities. Human connection and synergy build a new economy.

Going busking

Playing to a restless audience during an open mic, Rose is discouraged. Later she plays for Joe, and at a small party.

Rose sets out to give her first sidewalk performance. Her voice soars with a freedom that inspires passersby. Soon she earns 60 quid.

Everyday fairy tales

At times the film’s low budget shows in its editing and lighting. Yet this is independent film at its best, directed with originality, depth and insight. City of Dreamers pays homage to idealists and oddballs alike. It affirms our common humanity.

In an iconic scene, Rose and Joe attend a fancy dress party. Dressed like a princess, Rose is surrounded by a plume of golden balloons.

In another scene, Rose and Harry gaze at a sidewalk fire dancer. It’s the kind of moment found in bustling cities, places warm with culture and art.

 

A miracle moment

Brimson’s profound performance cinches a miracle moment. Joe, who has been homeless for years, is offered a bartending job by Harry. Beaming, he begins to serve customers. He no longer needs street donations.

Miracles are just this sudden and unremarkable. We seem to be separate. Suddenly, we are one. (4 out of 5 stars)

If you like City of Dreamers, you might enjoy:  Midnight in Paris; An Education.

 

City of Dreamers  /   2011  /  NR  /  2 hours

Cast Overview:  Ellen Cosgrove, Ross Scarfield, Eddy Brimson, Diego Alcacer, George Webster, Amanda Piery, Rebecca Oakley, Daniel Wheeler, Ray James, Jamie Patterson, Christian Hearn, Aslan Steel, Emma Styf, Ben Thomson, Dan Miles, Norman Cook.

Director: Jamie Patterson

Genres:  Drama, Music, Romantic Drama

Filed Under: Awaken, Community, Heal, Learn & Grow Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Timewave 2013: master time as you live in the present moment

March 3, 2012 By

We can master time in a world without limits, according to Timewave 2013: The Future is Now. Part two of director Sharron Rose’s documentary 2012: The Odyssey delves into Mayan prophecies and ideas of time.

As Rose visits the Q’ero, shamans and healers descended from the ancient Incans, you can hear their guidance. The DVD is available from Sacred Mysteries Productions.

Rare visit with the Q’ero

Rose meets the Q’ero in the Andes Mountains of Peru. They fled the Spanish Conquest some 500 years ago. The Q’ero live in the present moment. They do not own televisions, computers or cell phones.

With clear perception, the Q’ero have mastered time. This allows them to travel to the past and present. Seeing Earth’s future allows them to share prophecies. Anthropologist and psychologist Dr. Alberto Villoldo translates for the shamans.

Despacho ceremony purifies

Shamans Don Umberto Sonco and Dona Bernadina Sonco perform a Despacho ceremony to help release negativity and change the future. The Despacho is a mandala made with objects that symbolize beauty, endearment and humor. Cookies, candies, roots and flowers are used here.

The Q’ero place all negative thoughts and feelings into the objects. The shamans blow prayers into coca leaves and add them to the Despacho.

Vision of the future

The ceremony becomes a metaphor for purification and renewal throughout the film. Rose blows her prayers into the coca leaves “to dispel the wars and suffering that is the story of this age just ending.”

Rose sees a new world “built around the idea of partnership and cooperation” where “Nature would be restored and men and women live together in peace.”

Finally the bundle is thrown into a fire, symbolically burning up negativity and sending prayers into the world.

The Q’ero pray and prophesy

The Q’ero share wisdom from the ancient Incan prophet Pachacuti. “The world, which has gone into chaos, will be turned right side up again, and a new human will be born,” says Rose. New humans are seen in bodies of light.

Disasters will affect many areas of the world, says Don Umberto. “We must make our prayers to the feminine, to the Mother. We must come back to the ways of the feminine, of stewardship, of protection.”

“The United States has a great power, it has great brilliance, great resources. It is up to the United States to take leadership in the world. To bring peace, to bring balance back to the planet,” Don Umberto says.

Nature of time is changing

Western linear time is founded on cause and effect, says Villoldo. Time turns like a wheel for indigenous societies. Based on synchronicity, shamanic time allows us to influence the past and future.

“When we’re able to engage a different form of time, we’re not only the result of an earlier cause,” Villoldo explains. “The future can reach back like a giant hand and bring you forward into who you are becoming. So we can be informed by who we are becoming.”

Age of the Great Lie

“We live in the age of the great lie,” says Villoldo. We distrust politicians, medicine and the media. “It’s a conspiracy of mediocrity,” he believes. Philosopher and scholar Jean Houston adds, “It’s like every shadow that ever existed has risen to be faced so that we can make the next step.”

Author Whitley Strieber believes that extinction events will mark 2012. Others say that profound evolutionary shifts are unfolding within us. “What is probably more likely going on is that we are in the grip of a gigantic change” as “the old ways are dying,” explains producer and author Jay Weidner.

An Age of Peace

“Ancient texts and traditions say that we are preparing for 1,000 years of a peaceful coexistence in this world,” New York Times best-selling author Gregg Braden tells Rose. “Sometimes our greatest strengths become apparent when we face the greatest challenges together,” he adds.

“We have this window of opportunity to make a really radical and fast transition to a different social paradigm and a different sustainable infrastructure,” says author and producer Daniel Pinchbeck (2012: Time for Change).

“We are heading toward a singularity in history in which yesterday looks nothing like today, and today looks nothing like tomorrow,” says Houston.

A view of enlightenment

Enlightenment is a way to free ourselves from the “cultural trance” of the modern world. “The whole change of the world has to start with you,” Rose told Awareness Magazine. “If you want a world of beauty and connectivity, you have to start with yourself.”

“You will be firmly grounded in the material world, and from this place, bring your expanded knowledge and perception into your every action,” she noted. “As you bring this expanded energy into your physical body, your whole body will begin to become lighter. You will heal. This is what they mean by enlightenment.”

As in part one, Timewave 2013 includes esoteric discussions about alchemy and astronomy.

Living love the best way to prepare

We nurture life-affirming or life-denying feelings every day, says Braden. Western science has shown that feelings do change our body chemistry.

“If we can reconcile our fears and our judgments and our bias, our jealousy and our anger as well as all the love, and accept the forgiveness and the tolerance and the compassion that comes our way every day. . . . we have already prepared for whatever eventuality,” Braden maintains.

“Compassion and forgiveness are the path towards true liberation,” says Villoldo. “The year 2012 is not only a purging but also an embrace of all that is really important to us.” (4 out of 5 stars)

If you like Timewave 2013, you might enjoy: 2012: The Odyssey; 2012: Time for Change; Thrive.

 

Timewave 2013: The Future is Now /   2008  /  NR  /  1 hour, 28 min

Cast Overview:  Jose Arguelles, Gregg Braden, Riane Eisler, William Henry, Jean Houston, John Major Jenkins, Rick Levine, Dennis McKenna, Terence McKenna, Don Martine Pinedo, Vilma Pinedo, Daniel Pinchbeck, Sharron Rose, Umberto Sonco, Bernadina Sonco, Geoff Stray, Whitley Strieber, Alberto Villoldo, Jay Weidner

Director: Sharron Rose

Genres:  Documentary

 

Filed Under: Awaken, Character, Community, Compassion, Documentary, Forgiveness, Heal, Learn & Grow, Spirituality, Transformation Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sharron Rose dances through change, mystery in 2012: The Odyssey

January 14, 2012 By

In 2012: The Odyssey, filmmaker Sharron Rose investigates humanity’s much-heralded 2012 evolutionary turning point.

Catastrophe or ecstasy?

Rose interviews visionary scholars about 2012 as she travels across the country.

New York Times best-selling author Gregg Braden says that the end date of a Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012 signals the sun’s alignment with the center of the Milky Way galaxy. This occurs once every 26,000 years.

Earth’s magnetism reaches its lowest point at that time, says Braden. The magnetic fields will then shift 180 degrees. The North Pole will become the South Pole, and vice versa.

Braden believes that we will not experience the physical devastation or “apocalypse” that many predict.

Creating change from within

A shift is happening now within each one of us, Braden asserts. “People are truly ready for a change, for an end to the suffering.” As we make “life-affirming or life-denying choices, we’ll either experience the rapture or the ascension.” He calls it a “beautiful yet painful unfolding.”

We can align with these new energies “by living lives consciously with intent, by being kind to one another, by acts of kindness.”

In the Golden Age everyone lives by love and heart-centered values like compassion, say spiritual teachers. This replaces the world’s Iron or Patriarchal age with its emphasis on power, money and status.

Divine Feminine perspective

As 2012: The Odyssey opens, Rose decides to stop watching television news. She spends more time in nature “to think about who we are, the way we relate to the earth, and to the people around us.”

Commercialism and technology contribute to a “cultural trance,” says Rose. By breaking free of this mindset we can remember how to live an “epic life.”

From a perspective of honoring and love, Rose reveals wisdom and reverence across cultures. This documentary may be the only feature film about 2012 directed by a woman.

A window of opportunity

Braden tells Rose that “We all play a vital role in where we’re going.” According to quantum physics, “If you change your life you’ll change your body, and if you change your body you’ll change your world.”

The world around us, Braden says, is “nothing more, nothing less than a mirror of what we have become collectively from within.”

This time is “a window of opportunity,” he says. “We’ll be more of ourselves than we ever have been before, without the magnetism of the Earth holding our perceptions and our beliefs and our preconceptions and bias in place.”

Iron Age turns to Golden Age

When you align with love and service, the darkest possibilities of millennial change don’t have to happen, says Braden. Right now “we’re re-writing the code so disaster doesn’t have to occur.”

Earth’s magnetic reversal has happened “only 14 times in the last 4.5 million years,” said Braden. “Magnetic fields also act as the glue in consciousness. As the glue gets weaker, we have greater opportunities to transcend beliefs.”

You can see the new age unfolding with increasing unrest as “things not in integrity collapse upon themselves,” he says.

Post-modern world lives

Psychologist and medical anthropologist Alberto Villoldo tells Rose that “We live in a post-modern world of sustainability, of deep ecology, of great reverence for the Earth.”

The modern world, he says, was founded on “greed, on ever-increasing economies and growth, on readily renewable resources.”

We align with Divinity

“It’s really an initiation of the Western world,” says author and teacher Jose Arguelles. “The real nature of the Divine is synchronicity. It’s a metaphor for us in our limited ego states coming back into connection with our Divine, eternal selves.”

Arguelles says we “must dissolve all the old identifications and attachments about who we have to be to be successful.” He predicts we’ll experience the Noosphere or “telepathic mind of the earth” between December 2012 and December 2013.

“The human experience is the main event,” author Terence McKenna says. “I believe what is in fact going on is that we are burning our bridges one by one, freeing the mind, empowering the imagination.”

Indigo children

Rose interviews a friend named Jewel who holds her baby Armand. Armand, who will be 7 years old in 2012, smiles, shouts and looks directly into the camera. He seems to underscore each point his mother makes.

An indigo child is “a powerful, intelligent, independent child who is believed to have an important spiritual impact” according to Dictionary.com. Indigo children challenge authority, Jewel says. They are system-busters.

Deep mysteries

“The global currency of our planet is four things: earth, air, fire and water,” says Rose. The “buy now, pay later” practice has threatened the sustainability of life on Earth.

Watching 2012: The Odyssey invites you into deep mystery. It is a mystical film that “changes” every time you watch it, giving you deeper insights and perspectives.

More adventures

Producer and author Jay Weidner speaks about alchemy, masons and the great Gothic cathedrals throughout Europe. Traveling Incan elders pray and share a message.

Rose visits the Georgia Guidestones (known as the “American Stonehenge,”) and reads the message left by the mysterious R.C. Christian in modern and ancient languages.

“Avoid petty laws and useless officials,” it says in part. “Balance personal rights with social duties.” “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.”

Both McKenna and Arguelles have died since this film was made. The teachings of McKenna, Arguelles and others interviewed are posted online.

The Odyssey continues

Rose is the author of The Path of the Priestess and a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in World Mythology, Religion, and the Sacred Arts of Dance, Music and Theater.

Film represents “the dance of light” in our times, Rose says. (4 out of 5 stars)

If you like 2012: The Odyssey, you might enjoy: 2012: Time for Change; Thrive; Timewave 2013: The Future is Now.

 

2012: The Odyssey /   2007  /  NR  /  1 hour, 39 min

Cast Overview:  Jose Arguelles, Gregg Braden, John Major Jenkins, Terence McKenna, Sharron Rose, Geoff Stray, Moira Timms, Alberto Villoldo, Jay Weidner

Director: Sharron Rose

Genres:  Documentary

Filed Under: Awaken, Character, Community, Compassion, Documentary, Environment, Heal, Learn & Grow, Native & Life Wisdom, Spirituality, Transformation Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,