Lord I: The Records Keeper

Duration: 15:20m / A hand-drawn film by Lori Damiano

Synopsis:

Lord I : The Records Keeper is a story of a distracted yet devoted archivist who is called to travel to the Kingdom of They to make records of the happenings in that troubled tangled realm.  Along the way, she becomes suspicious that something is lacking in her observations.  A sudden storm of activity separates her from her record keeping tools.  This change leads Lord I to discover a depth of experience that she had been missing. 

Filmmaker’s Statement:

Lord I: The Records Keeper was created as my thesis film in the Experimental Animation Program at the California Institute of the Arts.  The story was conceived after attending my first Vipassana Meditation course.  Vipassana is translated as “Seeing things as they really are”.  I left that course profoundly energized at discovering how much the perception of my surroundings, experiences, and interactions with others was being polluted by my own mental chatter.  I was very excited to try and explore a way of visualizing this chatter in an animation in an attempt to help others become conscious of, and able to work towards dismissing their own self-perpetuated mental barriers. 

Additionally, at the time I began this film I was living in a canyon surrounded by wilderness.  I started a self-driven naturalist training program wherein the student determines a sit-spot near their home to practice stillness and observe their environment for an hour every day.  I was delighted to discover that if one sits in stillness and silence in nature for about ten minutes, a hidden world of activity emerges as the birds resume their songs and the wildlife no longer detect you as a threat.  Without practicing awareness, I would have not have been able to access the density of activity and beauty that was all around me.  I learned to relish the subtle sensory treasures that could be encountered when I actively shifted my focus in this way.  Exploring these two practices of stillness led me to sustain an ongoing sense of wonderment and compassion that I previously hadn’t known.   This film is an attempt at sharing these findings.