Award-winning Film maker
Everyone knows the African proverb "It takes a village to raise a child." But few know Michael Meade's apt inversion: "It takes the struggles of youth to raise a village." Our functioning as a community can best be measured by how effective we are in offering our young people growthful rites of passage into adulthood - effective challenges that can positively define them as newly emergent adults. It's our job as elders to hold and contain the energy of young people during their time of furious transition. The implications of not doing so already surround us in the myriad forms of dysfunctional teen behavior. What can we do to repair this breech in the generational chain? A long-time student of these issues, Frederick Marx has some inspiring ideas.
Frederick Marx is an internationally acclaimed, Oscar and Emmy nominated director/writer with 35 years in the film business. He was named a Chicago Tribune Artist of the Year for 1994, a 1995 Guggenheim Fellow, and a recipient of a Robert F. Kennedy Special Achievement Award. His film HOOP DREAMS played in hundreds of theatres nationwide after winning the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and was the first documentary ever chosen to close the New York Film Festival. It was on over 100 "Ten Best" lists nationwide and was named Best Film of the Year by critics Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, Gene Shalit, and Ken Turran and by the Chicago Film Critics Association. Ebert also named it Best Film of the Decade. It is one of the highest grossing non-musical documentaries in United States history.
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Notes and Quotes from Frederick's talk:
"Don't ask yourself what the world needs.
Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
- Howard Thurman (a mentor to MLK)
Everyone has the perfect gift to give the world - and if each of us is freed up to give the gift that is uniquely ours to give, the world will be in total harmony.
Buckminster Fuller
A community that does not incorporate the vibrant capacities of its youth is cutting off the wellspring of its own sustenance.”
Michael Meade
End with:
MAYA DEREN POEM:
As their flesh once labored to bring forth flesh
So the minds of the elders labor,
With like passion,
To bring forth a mind.
By rites of initiation
They would accomplish
The metamorphosis of matter into man,
The evolution of a mind for meaning in the animal
Which is the issue of their flesh
By this
they would ensure that the race endure
As a race of men
The rites of this second birth
Into the metaphysical cosmos,
Everywhere mime the conditions of
The first physical birth
The novice is
Purified of the past,
Relieved of possessions,
Made innocent,
Placed nascent in the womb solitude…
The matter,
Which is man himself,
And the myth of a race,
Are joined.
His solitary meditation
Is a gestation
And, in the end,
A man emerges by ordeal,
To be newly named, newly rejoiced in.
Maya Deren (1952)
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