Causecast

Causecast works with over 50 of our nation’s most active and innovative nonprofits, and we thought it was about time that we started highlighting some of the great work individual activists are able to do through these organizations.

This week’s featured activist is Roko Belic, a documentary filmmaker whose 1999 film Genghis Blues, about a blind San Francisco singer who travels to the Asian land of Tuva to learn about traditional throat singing, earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature. His newest film, Happiness, seeks to discover what elements in the world truly make us happy.

Causecast featured organization, Creative Visions Foundation, works to foster artist-activists committed to using art to better the world around them. Belic recently sat down with Causecast to talk about his work, the impact Creative Visions has had on his evolution as an artist, and how he was influenced by Dan Eldon, son of Creative Visions founder Kathy Eldon.

How did you meet Dan Eldon? How did your friendship with him influence your filmmaking?

I met Dan through a seemingly random series of events that primarily starts with my desire to go to Africa after my freshman year of college. My friend Jeff and I applied to a bunch of relief organizations volunteering to do things like help build schools, hospitals or teach English. Strangely, though we were offering to pay our own travel to and from Africa, we were rejected by everyone we wanted to volunteer with.

Then my friend Chris, who was close friends while at boarding school in England with Lengai Croze, told us about Lengai’s friend Dan, who was organizing a relief mission to Mozambique, to help refugees of the then 17 year long civil war. Chris said he thought Dan might have room for a few more people on the trip, specifically a film crew to document the whole thing. I knew we’d have to bluff big if there was any chance of us getting selected as a film crew, but of course we would try. I’d used a video camera a few times, I helped Chris make a few super 8 movies when we were kids, but I was no professional filmmaker. I also knew Dan must be at least 50 years old and must have led missions all over Africa if he was going to help war refugees.

Chris got a phone number for Dan, who happened to be in Pasadena, only a couple hours drive from where I was going to school in Santa Barbara, so we called to make an appointment to apply for the spot on his team. I prepared my formal voice for the call but the phone wasn’t answered by Dan’s secretary, as I’d expected, but instead by an ebullient girl who was trying to understand who was calling over the dance music that was blasting in her ear. I thought I had the wrong number but asked for Dan anyway. The phone got passed around the room, finally Dan got on and asked if we were coming to the party “it’s apartment 212!” or something like that, he said. I said I was calling about the relief mission, I was too far away to come to the party, and we agreed to meet the following weekend.

When I showed up at his place it was a typical college room, maybe even less than typical, there was barely any furniture! Someone had been sleeping in the corner of the living room floor, I think that was Dan. A couple people, who apparently didn’t live there, were making lunch from the scraps that were left in a nearly bare kitchen. But there was a bookshelf that was packed, and on the bottom shelf I saw a sketch book that was packed with stuff, I didn’t know what, swollen to about five times its normal thickness. When I opened it, I was amazed. In it were layers of fantastic images and textures that absolutely blew me away. A WWI looking Land Rover with a buffalo skull hanging off the roof rack, a small boy with his fist in the air breaking a rifle that had been painted over the photo, a skinny dancing man with eyes painted white like a demon, a pretty girl with a cheetah right next to her! I couldn’t believe that this was real, these were the images of a real person’s life. I was floored and wanted nothing more than to go on the trip.

Dan suggested we do something, go on a safari. Someone suggested Las Vegas – though it was late, we said we’d head in that direction. We drove to the desert, saw a rock band practicing on the side of a mountain road, took a dirt road where the Ford Tempo Dan was driving got stuck on some big rocks, climbed a small mountain, watched the sunset and found a rattling rattlesnake on the way down because one of the girls had accidentally kicked it barefoot while running down the mountain. Dan agreed that we should go on the STA safari, he gave us some coordinates of where to be when, and that was pretty much it. He took a leap of faith on us, and it changed my life.

His biggest influence on my filmmaking is probably in cinematography. He made ordinary things extraordinary, he used what was available to make drama, he used contrast of light and dark, beauty and horror, pleasure and pain, and his best images are greater than the sum of the parts that make up the image. I aspire to do those things with the images in my movies. Probably more importantly, though, is that Dan saw adventure in ordinary errands, ecstasy in the mundane, and life as a safari. That perspective: open, interested, excited, engaged, vulnerable – is what I hope to maintain as I make films.

What’s been your most memorable moment working with Creative Visions?

When my brother and I finished our film Genghis Blues and it was accepted to Sundance (1999), we had to raise $40,000 in one month to make a film print. Videos weren’t accepted at the festival yet. In 4 years of making the film, we’d only succeeded in raising $2,000 – so there was little promise we’d be able to raise the money. At our first fundraiser, which Creative Visions helped organize, Kathy stood up and gave a rousing speech about the power of our movie and pledged, out loud, the first chunk of money for our film print. It wasn’t the money that was important, it was Kathy and Amy’s support of our project and their willingness to put themselves behind it 100 percent.

Can you talk about Happiness?

I’ve spent the last three years or so making a documentary on happiness. It was the idea of a very successful Hollywood director of comedies. He read in the newspaper that America was the 25th happiest country in the world, and he was surrounded in Beverly Hills by many of the richest, most talented, most beautiful, most powerful people in the world and they didn’t seem very happy. Why? So he asked me to make a documentary exploring happiness. We interviewed many of the world’s leading happiness researchers (we immediately learned that a whole field of science was just forming around the study of happiness, for the first time ever) as well talked to ordinary people in 14 countries to find out their ideas on happiness. It’s been a pretty amazing journey, something I feel lucky for every day because it relates to just about everything I do. And my life’s changed because of it.

What would you say to a young person who wanted to get involved with public service but wasn’t sure where to begin?

If you REALLY want to get involved, the opportunities are everywhere. If you know someone that needs help, start there. If you see someone that needs help, even if you don’t know them, start there. If you are interested in anything, start there. If you get rejected from a volunteer organization, figure out another way to help. Help your neighbor, be kind to people, say hello to people on the street. Every action counts.

What’s next for you and Creative Visions? How do you want to best promote their activities and your own work?

I believe in cooperation and in the goodness of people. Together we can nurture love, happiness and fun in the world. Being honest and impassioned with my work and with that of Creative Visions’ other collaborators is the root from which our joined future springs.