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SHAMANS
MISSION - SUMMARY
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SHAMANS
A Film by Marianna Yarovskaya
THE PROJECT: Our world today is in crisis (economic, cultural, environmental and spiritual) and in great need of leadership and positive inspiration. Throughout time, shamans have been
the keepers of knowledge about the natural world, human health and our spiritual well-being: wisdom that has been passed down
from one generation to the next for millennia. But their wealth of wisdom and very existence is now increasingly under threat
from environmental destruction, political persecution and the unstoppable
encroachment of the modern world.
Academy Award-winning filmmaker, Marianna Yarovskaya, will travel to some of the few remaining ecologically pure
and remote places on Earth - the Altai Region of Russia's Siberia, the
Yunnan Province in China, the Peruvian Amazon and the jungles of
Indonesia - to seek out four of the world's last remaining shamanistic
cultures and their revered shaman leaders to ask them how to heal the
world.
The mission of the Shamans Documentary and Educational Outreach Project is to tell their
stories and record their wisdom, teachings and insights, and to share their messages
about personal well being, social justice and global environmental healing to a
broad and diverse national and international audience.
This project represents a unique opportunity to research and record ancient wisdom, and to use it to bring us together around shared environmental and social justice concerns. We believe this is film has the potential to be highly commercial while still carrying powerful messages about the importance of global community and environmental healing. To broaden the reach of the project’s educational message, the film’s producers will work with a variety of outreach partners including the Nature Conservancy, the Center for Biodiversity and Indigenous Knowledge, and Filmsprout.org which specializes in semi-theatrical distribution and outreach. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Shamans is the creation of filmmaker, Marianna Yarovskaya. Marianna directed and producedUndesirables, (1998) which won a Student Academy Award (Student Oscar), a College Emmy Award and screened at Cannes. She has worked as a Producer and Senior Editor for Discovery Channel, National Geographic TV, History Channel, NASA and for Greenpeace USA. Marianna's film Holy Warriors on a sniper who became a priest played in 35 countries worldwide and won numerous awards. She was also a producer of Countdown to Zero, which was selected at Cannes Film Festival. She is also 2010 US-China Fulbright finalist to do film research in Yunnan province, People's Republic of China for this film. In 2006 she was Head of Research for An Inconvenient Truth, which won an Academy Award. Several members of that production team will be working on Shamans. Shamans will be a visually stunning love story to our planet and a testament to the strength of the human spirit. Its style is inspired by the power of films like Baraka (1992) and its sequel, Samsara, and Latcho Drom (a film about Gypsies around the world). The wisdom and way of life of the last remaining shamanistic cultures is increasingly under siege from logging interests, oil exploration, vanishing water resources and global commercialization. Shamans is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to record a first-hand account of their teachings and wisdom, and to share it with the world before it's gone forever. Filmmaking has already begun for Shamans in Indonesia and the Alta Region of Russia. |
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