Talking Films with Friends in Russia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Israel
Welcome from the site of ancient inscriptions in stone along a lava wall in Santa Fe, New Mexico, carvings that date back hundred of years, between the 13th and 17th centuries or even earlier in some accounts, from 8000 to 2000 BC. Perhaps the unknown person who wrote on stone wished to express a basic human desire for connection: I was here and I want you to see me as a fellow human being.
We see the same impulse with a new video on my YouTube channel—Santa Fe at Noon—participants from Serbia, Bulgaria, Israel, Russia and myself in the USA gathered on the internet to discuss films and filmmaking, with added clips from documentaries that I directed.
We call the interview, Santa Fe at Noon, originating from Moscow and organized by Nikolay Simankov. I met Nikolay eight years ago when the US State Department sponsored my travel to Russia to present a film I directed on recycling, Racing to Zero, produced by Diana Fuller. The tour was coordinated with Russian organizations such as Greenpeace Russia.
As I traveled from Moscow to Saint Petersburg to Vladivostok, I presented workshops on Cinematography using phone-based cameras and offered a workshop on Environmental Filmmaking. Nikolay was the cinematographer and editor who recorded the Cinematography workshop in Moscow.
