 Hi I'm Marianne Elliott and I'm here at New Frontiers 2016 and I'm here with Ian McKenzie, a new Paradigm filmmaker and we're going to talk a little bit about story and about a new Paradigm film that Ian is working on. So one of the questions that I'm interested in is the relationship between short-form story making which we see more and more and more of through social media and other avenues and longer-form story making and how do you see them relating to each other? I think with the advent of distribution technology like YouTube and cheaper but high-quality video cameras we are seeing an explosion of content of filmmaking in all forms. I think given the kind of attention deficit though we have with the amount of opportunity people have to watch things that often you know we really look to be caught and hooked really quickly you know to get into anything and so in this way short-form filmmaking it can be really effective as an immediate hook you know into a concept or an idea that then perhaps leads the viewer into a much longer piece but at that point they've already their curiosity is there so it's like they've already chosen to make explore further but often just having a short piece can be enough like you'd be surprised about how significant a core idea can be articulated you know and have an impact and then shared to of course impact others when it's short when it's concise and so again often that's enough so I think we're really at a time where it's asking a certain type of kind of discipline in the art of short filmmaking the discipline to like really articulate that core idea and then but also give avenues for people to go deep if they really want I'd also love to hear a little bit more from you specifically about the new film that you shared last night it's a film that explores an emergent theme an important theme around the feminine but you chose a very specific subject area in which to examine that I'm interested in like how and why you chose that thank you the the subject of well the rising feminine has been of interest to me I mean just as a as I look out of the activist scene and particularly you know themes and spirituality and just this idea that this new world is has a very strong feminine component or a new wave of feminine power and for me that's the topic is compelling but also like unless it's grounded in something like the real lives of real people it can often be just too philosophical and you know often you know a lot of films feature docs which is talking heads about an idea of something right and it can be really hard for people to grasp like what does that actually mean so for me personally this story begins actually a film love with an artist particular she goes by the name apocat and I actually heard a mix that somebody played of hers back in 2012 and and they say nothing happened in 2012 but this mix I listened to it and she'd crafted it and I knew I was like there's something going on here that was different than the electronic music I'd heard I didn't know what it was at the time but I had this idea of like that there's something mysteriously significant and that led she led to a journey of like seeking her out and in asking her like what are you actually doing with the way you craft your music with the way you sequence you know tracks with really the field that gets created on the dance floor which seemed somehow different than what might get created with say a man or masculine you know person up there on the decks and from there really launched me in this deep journey of you know I was introduced to other women in the scene who are doing very kind of similar but unique you know expressions of electronic music and really this deeper question as well of like what unique gift does the feminine have to offer this time you know that really became the core of this film and and I said it against the backdrop of the electronic music scene it's not really about electronic music in that sense the film really became sort of these these journeys of these women you know in their late 20s early 30s and their own sort of coming into their own power really looking at you know how do they take the ways that they've been wounded from you living in the patriarchy living in in a culture which often you know doesn't honor the feminine and how do they take these wounds and actually transmit them into their greatest gifts and that's what that's what I tried to show in the film I tried to show that that that exact kind of wound itself like you know it gives us the capacity I mean men have a similar but different you know mechanism for that and so I really just tried to show that and in that way just become the platform for these women to shine. I'm gonna ask one last question and I guess the the invitation is to see if we can in sort of as succinctly as possible name what it is that is different about a personally a personal narrative approach to exploring a question like the feminine rising versus a more theoretical or abstract like what is it that makes it different what is it that makes it work for you? I think this really speaks to the power of story and you know many I think storytellers and even activists and things have come to this realization that you know it's very hard to care about something or someone if you don't know their story and there's something innately kind of automatic when we hear a story we get bound to that person in some way and so just like you know you hear the story of the Syrian refugee you know when the statistics you're kind of like you know you might have like wow it's so you know painful to hear but it still is not real right until we experience it through the eyes or story of another person and so I think this actually taps into a deep sense of our humanness actually I think it was the fellow he did the empathy basically empathic civilization Jeremy Rifkin I believe talked about you know humans are built with these mirroring kind of emotional empathic mirroring capacities that you know once we experience a pain or suffering in another if we really let it in and we experience it as our own like that ability to kind of drop the barrier between you know one self and the other is like actually one of our deep human gifts and through telling stories is how we actually you know create that you know en masse and as media makers