ScaredSacred

ScaredSacred charts the personal pilgrimage of Canadian writer/director Velcrow Ripper as he visits some of the world's top disaster zones, reflecting on the way that the afflicted deal with grief, pain and suffering.

The reason for this pilgrimage is by no means transparent, although he mentions his childhood dreams about journeys, which progressively got darker as he grew older. Wanting to confront his dreams and confused state of mind, he believes he is part of a nightmare that needs to be explored by setting out on a quest that will take him to the world's 9/11s.

His first port of call is Bhopal, India, where in 1984, gas leaked from a tank of methyl isocyanate (MIC) at a plant owned and operated by Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL), killing 8000 people within hours and many more thereafter. With the authorities evading responsibility, the people had to struggle alone, demonstrating great tenacity, which he applauds. However, why he chose this as a starting point is a mystery.

His next stop is Cambodia, as he moves in on the psychological vestiges of the Khmer Rouge in the Seventies, where thousands of "dissenters" were killed, disappeared or rounded up into concentration camps. His angle focuses on one young man's efforts to clear up the millions of land mines left across the country. Making it his life's work, he decommissions dozens of mines every day.

Bosnia is his next destination, where he meets artists Mr and Mrs Bejovic, a youngish married couple. Recounting the process of "desensitization to death," they found solace and survival in their work. Trapped indoors for most of the four year civil war, they learned the sound patterns of gunfire, knowing when the snipers would stop to reload, at which point they'd make a move. Living in Sniper Alley, they worked non-stop as a means of maintaining sanity.

This documentary is as arbitrary and random as it sounds. No tenable links are provided between the countries visited. Instead, Ripper views each disaster from a humanitarian perspective. Less interested in the politics of it, he fills his palette with the colourful emotion of those most affected. He visits Tibetan monks, studies Buddhism himself and goes to Japan to discuss the impact of the atomic bomb, by which point he says, "I need a rest."

This is the proof of the pudding. The film's biggest flaw is its overwhelming subjectivity. Embroiled in his own personal turmoil, he jumps from place to place without forming any sense of coherence, imposing a sense of confusion upon the viewer, supplemented by an interminably languid, whiny voice, robbing the project of artistic substance and credible objectivity.

Continuing on to Afghanistan, before returning to Union Square, New York, and then back half way across the world to Israel is evidence enough of his convoluted state of mind. In the end, his conclusion is that sacred places are where people go to acknowledge and come to terms with tragedy.

Is this revelation worthy of a feature-length documentary?