The First Meeting

Father Charles Brandt is ninety three years old and lives in a hermitage that is a quarter mile from the road in a dense woods about a stones throw from the Oyster River.  We became interested in doing a documentary on Father Charles when a friend of ours, Anne Davies told us about his unique existence in the woods of Vancouver Island. We were interested in exploring why someone would choose this solitary life and how his commitment to meditation, contemplation, and achieving a certain stillness in his life could help us cope with the incessant chatter of technology.

Father Charles Brandt Hermitage

During our first meeting with Father Charles we decided that the initial interviews would cover the biographical details of his life and then as we grew more comfortable we could begin to ask the important "why?" questions.

Interviewing Father Charles

We used a technique where by a half silvered mirror was placed in front of the camera lens at a forty-five degree angle.  Anita Clearfield, who is interviewing Father Charles is reflected in the mirror allowing Father Charles to look directly in the lens while still maintaining eye contact with Anita. The benefit to this is to have Charles look directly at the viewer rather than the viewer being a third party who is eavesdropping on a conversation.  

We interviewed Father Charles for about forty minutes the first day, taking us through his early years and into college.

Political Boundries

April 24
We flew into Vancouver airport at around four o'clock today.  As we passed through customs Anita and I were waved through with our carts piled high with production equipment.  Shannon was pulled out of the line and was whisked away into a Immigration's warren of offices.  Anita and I were left in the large waiting area as Shannon went through an awful ordeal.  It seems that the authorities were convinced that Shannon was getting paid to work in Canada - this is illegal as the assumption is that any money she makes is taking a job away from Canadian citizens.  The authorities took away her phone and computer, scanned them for incriminating e-mails and messages, and then interrogated her for two hours.  The woman who was her interrogator was totally convinced that Shannon was here to make a documentary and was somehow getting paid to do it (anyone who makes documentaries knows how foolish that assumption was) and produced e-mails from us to Shannon about the logistics of the trip where we talked about paying for her ticket to Vancouver.  In the end they ended up calling us and we verified everything that Shannon had said and she was released.

I guess what bothers me the most is the powerlessness that we have in situations like this - our reasoning, negotiating and verbal skills mean nothing against someone who is so convinced of a person's guilt.  It also makes me think of the many parts of the world where this kind of interrogation and abuse are daily occurrences - I am particularly thinking of the Palestinians who must wait in lines for hours to pass check points - never knowing whether they will get to the work or back to their families.  We are privileged Americans and we can be overwhelmed by the system - imagine those who are poor and don't know the language who are routinely abused by the protectors of our political and economic borders.