Some thoughts from Producer/Director, Rhonda Moskowitz
I read with horror about the Black Friday stampede of 2,000 shoppers at a Long Island, New York Walmart that killed a 34 year old employee, Jdimytai Damour. Tension built as people waited for hours to buy merchandise at bargain prices. When the doors opened the crowd rushed in and a life was extinguished. And for what? A flat screen TV? A computer? A camera? To save a few bucks?
Meanwhile, on Plum Island in Massachusetts, 79 year old widow, Geri Buzzotta’s ocean front house was deemed unsafe and demolished the night before Thanksgiving so it wouldn’t fall into the sea. A couple of days later, she returned to the wreckage that was once her home. After seventy-nine years of living and 57 years of marriage, all that Geri Buzzotta could salvage was a shoe, two spoons, a necklace and a green heart-shaped piece of glass. “Everything else was taken away, but love never dies,” was her remarkable reaction.
I think about how some of my film subjects live with only the bare basics in their prison cells. When they were arrested, cell phones, computers, cameras, nice clothes and whatever other stuff they possessed were suddenly taken away from them. Stuff they’ll only get back if or when they’re released.
Famous ascetics such as Siddhartha Guatama, (Buddha) and Henry David Thoreau consciously chose paths to enlightenment by living basic lives and casting off material goods. Solzhenitsyn’s semi-autobiographical, but fictional Ivan Denisovich successfully transcended his harsh prison surroundings.
Living a life of forced austerity is part of the punishment prisoners face for their crimes. I hope the prisoners in my film Teshuva (Return) will use their lack of stuff wisely and take advantage of their spartan existence to cleanse their souls. Their incarceration could be blessings in disguise.
The prisoners lives could teach us all a lesson. We have gone astray, not by having committed crimes, but with our passionate embrace of materialism. Perhaps we could make positive use of our disasterous economy and make some fundamental changes in our own lives. After all, we can all use a little soul cleansing.
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