The Harmony Event Series: Robin McKenna

We’re excited to welcome special guest Robin McKenna for the screening of the next film in The Harmony Event Series. Robin is director, producer and writer of GIFT, a feature-length documentary and crossmedia project inspired by Lewis Hyde’s bestseller The Gift. By now a modern classic, The Gift is a brilliantly orchestrated defense of the value of creativity and of its importance in a culture increasingly governed by money and overrun with commodities.

We will gather at the Juice Bar on February 21 at 6:30pm, when author and meditation teacher (and good friend of the Harmony :)) Jeff Warren will introduce GIFT and guide the audience through a meditation before we screen the film. Afterwards, in conversation with Robin, he’ll invite everyone into dialogue and reflection on creativity, generosity and how we share our gifts.

A little more about Robin: she grew up in Montréal, Canada, and began making films with La Course destination monde, travelling around the world alone with a camera making short, creative documentaries.  Her film The Great War Experience won Yorkton Film Festival’s Founders’ Award in 2007. She was producer and associate director of The Jungle Prescription, for CBC’s The Nature of Things, about ayahuasca, medicine and healing, with Dr. Gabor Maté.

She is currently making Thanadoula, a short animated documentary fairytale about a real-life “death doula”, in co-production with the NFB.  Recently she directed a short film with actress Geneviève Bujold, produced by the NFB for the Governor General’s Awards.

She has directed award-winning series for networks in the US and Canada, and her cinematography credits include City of Borders (Berlinale, Hot Docs 2009) and The Take with Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis (AFI Best Documentary 2004). She is an alumnus of Hot Docs’ Doc Lab, and has been a filmmaker-mentor in indigenous communities with Wapikoni Mobile.

GIFT is a richly cinematic film, interweaving character driven stories. On North America’s Pacific Northwest Coast, a young Indigenous man undertakes the elaborate preparations for a potlatch – to make a name for himself by giving everything away. In Rome, Italy, a factory occupied by migrant families is transformed into a living museum, protected by a barricade of art : a model of resistance, and an invaluable gift.  In the pirate utopia of Burning Man, a mutant bumblebee art car distributes honey in a post-­apocalyptic desert landscape. Meanwhile, in Auckland, New Zealand, artist Lee Mingwei prepares to launch Sonic Blossom – a “transformative gift” of song.

Check out the trailer: https://vimeo.com/283716447

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2019 at 1:49 pm. It is filed under Costa Rica. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.