ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL
Godfrey Reggio to receive the SFiFF’s Lifetime Achievement Award
Filmmakers have the opportunity to blaze their own trail with each project.
This is exactly what Godfrey Reggio has done his entire career.
The New Mexico resident will receive the Santa Fe International Film Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award on Oct. 22.
The award ceremony will be followed by the world premiere of Reggio’s film, “Once Within a Time.”
The film is created by Reggio and his longtime collaborators composer Philip Glass and filmmaker Jon Kane.
It is in the form of a bardic documentary, a fantasy of the real with themes of climate change and the perils of technology, and their effects on future generations. It is geared towards children – not the children of the future, children are the future.
Scene from Once Within A Time
“Godfrey Reggio has pushed us to explore the depths of our own imaginations,” says Jacques Paisner, SFiFF artistic director. “His films have done for filmmaking what the paintbrush did for painting.”
Reggio has lived in New Mexico since the 1960s.
He’s a pioneer of a film style that creates poetic images of extraordinary emotional impact for audiences worldwide.
Paisner says the filmmaker is prominent in the film world for his Qatsi trilogy, essays of visual images and sound that chronicle the destructive impact of the modern world on the environment.
Paisner says the title of Reggio’s 1982 film, “Koyaanisqatsi” is inspired by the insight of the Hopi word meaning “life out of balance.”
It is the first film in Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy, which also includes the 1988’s “Powaqqatsi,” meaning “life in transformation,” and 2002’s “Naqoyqatsi,” meaning “life as war.”
Glass composed the soundtracks for the three films.
Reggio, who spent 14 years in silence and prayer while studying to be a monk, has a history of service not only to the environment, but to youth street gangs, the poor and the community as well.
He’s taken all of his studies and taught grade school, secondary school and college.
In 1963, he co-founded Young Citizens for Action, a community organization project that aided juvenile street gangs.
Following this, Reggio co-founded La Clinica de la Gente, a facility that provided medical care to 12,000 community members in Santa Fe, and La Gente, a community-organizing project in northern New Mexico’s barrios.
In 1972, he co-founded the Institute for Regional Education in Santa Fe, a non-profit foundation focused on media development, the arts, community organization and research.
In 1974 and 1975, with funding from the American Civil Liberties Union, Reggio co-organized a multi-media public interest campaign on the invasion of privacy and the use of technology to control behavior.
Reggio will be honored at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 22 at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St. in Santa Fe.
By Adrian Gomez