More info here

Sometimes the idioms confuse me. “I kill you” in English is an awkward translation of a charming Farsi phrase that means something like, I love you so much I could eat you up. Jigar is said with a deep-throated rrr that is almost a growl, and is a term of endearment that means liver, as in, I think of you like my liver, which is pretty darned important to me.

In her dance classes we joke that Rouhi is the Queen of Iran as she watches us with eyes in the back of her head. She wants each dancer to find her own way of interpreting the steps, so that our differences are honored. She pushes us to move beyond being unsure and uncoordinated, to dancing like water, snakes, the wind, and the essential and eternal feminine. She demands our best and makes us work hard, but we slack off when she disappears to have a cigarette. (She smokes for heaven’s sake. What kind of example is that?!)

When my mind wanders she shoots me a sharp look. “Lydia, Jigar, concentrate or I kill you.” I’m pretty sure she means it in that good way. The night before the Persian New Year the hills of Los Angeles are blooming and the moon is bright. Throughout the city and on the beaches, fires are burning for this ancient Zoroastrian celebration of “new light” and “new day.” Parents take the hands of their children and leap over the fires together. The eyes of the little ones are full of amazement.

The forbidden fire that must not be touched or played with, is now inexplicably turned into a friend on this wonderful night. Teenage boys and girls tease each other and try to flirt and look bored at the same time—as if nothing matters, when it is clear that everything matters as much as it ever will in these precious moments in the firelight. A toddler practices her dance moves with the intensity of a diva. An old man with a walker seems content to watch from his fixed placed. A dapper Iranian man asks me to dance and says I look very happy. None of us are purists about the Persian aspects of the celebration. Santiago shows me a complicated salsa move. Michael holds me close through the tango. The DJ adds hip hop to the cultural remix. Rouhi is someone who welcomes all and celebrates all. She decorates the studio to honor all of the holidays observed by this dancing community of Muslins, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Bahá’í, and Buddhists. If people who say they are “spiritual but not religious” invented a holiday—she would decorate for that too.

We run and jump over the Norouz fires again and again, while the joyful noise of the music blares and the celebratory mood lifts our laughter to the sky with the rising smoke. I’m told that as we leap over the fire we are releasing the yellow energy of the fear and pain we have held within us, and inviting the red energy of courage and vitality embodied by the fire. We are One in this celebration and in our shared desire that this year be better than the last.
The great Persian poet Hafiz wrote, “I have learned so much from God that I can no longer call myself a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, A Buddhist, a Jew. The Truth has shared so much of Itself with me that I can no longer call myself a man, a woman, an angel, or even pure Soul. Love has befriended Hafiz so completely it has turned to ash and freed me of every concept and image my mind has ever known.”

At our next dance class Rouhi is beaming, “Wasn’t that fun!” Oh, yes, Jigar.

I met singer-songwriter Lee Harris at the British Film Institute screening of TWO SPIRITS at the arts complex on the banks of the Thames in London. After the film we walked over the bridge in the rain to a little Indian restaurant. Our conversation was not that of new friends getting acquainted, but of old friends newly reunited with a lifetime of catching up to do. We shared our histories and our dreams. We talked about the projects we were each making and what might happen next.

Lee saved the day shortly thereafter when I returned to post-production in the U.S. to revise the film for PBS and needed to quickly replace a piece of music. It’s in a key sequence where Fred describes who he is to his family and asks for their support. It was just the right place for the instrumental version of Lee’s piece Hollow, which you now hear as the music on this website. Here is Lee claiming Wicked Game in a powerful one-take performance that provides a larger sense of his musical work.

Story Circus is a hip, inventive, animated and live action series made up of an eclectic group of stories gathered under one big tent. The series is being developed by Riding The Tiger Productions in collaboration with an exceptional group of writers, animators, actors, and musicians—some of whom have kids and are itching to create for them, and others who just want to run off and join the storytelling circus.

From Belle’s Elephant

Belle had been hiding in her room, avoiding people, and feeling overwhelmed. At first she didn’t pay any attention to the knocking sound, but whoever was at the door was certainly persistent. The knocking was clearly not going to stop until she handled whatever it was. When there’s an elephant at the door you have to do something. “I hear you need an extraordinary experience,” the Elephant announced very loudly.

From Your Own Strong Song

Blue Jays are noisy, bossy birds who know exactly what they want.

But the boy named Jay didn’t know this yet. He had only just arrived, and all he knew was that the ranch was a very different kind of place than he had ever seen before.

It was wild and full of wind and space, with big fields, big trees and a river so big.

Lady smelled him with her cold nose, licking his face and jumping up and down as if she already knew him. She ran ahead to get Jay to follow her, to show him the winding path to the dusty barn to show him everything—right now!

Somehow, Jay had gotten through the very hard time that had come before. And now he was staying with Aunt Maggie and Uncle Dan on their ranch. He was starting a new life where everything would be different.

From The Hippopotamus and the Soda Cracker Tree

No one knows when stories like this begin. And the problem here began so far in the distant past it’s impossible to know how the trouble started. The Hippopotamus thought it was the fault of the crows, and the Crow would tell you it absolutely started with the bad behavior of hippopotamuses. If I tell you the Hippopotamus’s side of the story first, you’ll think terrible things about crows. And if I start with the Crow’s side, you’ll understand it better and might not think about the feelings of the Hippopotamus. But let’s begin now—so the story can end in the usual time and you can be off to do other things.

The three stories of the film reflect the range of cultures where honor killings are found. One story comes from Muslim culture, one from Hindu culture, and one Christian story is included as well. IN HER HONOR explores the psychological and historical roots of honor killings and, for the first time, turns the tables by focusing on the untold stories of the men who commit honor killings. The film goes beyond the obvious horror of what is done, to explore why it is done, and why it is done without remorse, and sometimes even with pride.

The film opens with an extended family gathered around a table after a meal. A family member who is not present is being discussed, and it is she who has caused the family’s honor to be questioned by refusing the marriage chosen for her. She is much loved, but because she will not change her mind there is no other option. A young cousin will handle it so that he will be treated as a minor if caught. The voiceover explaining these events comes from an interview with her father. As the patriarch, he made the decision and she was killed, her body hidden, and her disappearance never reported.

“I named you Nirupama, a person who is incomparable. But the step you have taken, or are going to take is against our religion. When people stick to religion, it saves them from all troubles, but when they go against it, the same religion destroys them.”

A man who killed for honor—and who we meet briefly in the first act and see again seeming to defend his actions in the second act—will describe his deep remorse, his journey to understanding, and his work to stop honor killings. He risks his life to challenge a traditional view of women that he believes must be changed throughout the world. It’s a story audiences have not seen before.

IN HER HONOR: Interview with Director from Lydia Nibley on Vimeo.

Interview with Lydia Nibley, the director of the documentary IN HER HONOR.

The film team is in pre-production and is currently reaching out to additional funders in the U.S. and internationally. Just Media is a 501(c)(3) organization and contributions to IN HER HONOR are tax deductible. Please call 818.824.3944 for more information about the project.

Thank you for supporting IN HER HONOR, and for sharing it with others for whom the film’s subjects and goals are of interest. Together we will create a film that will be seen by millions of people and both challenge audiences and inspire change.

“In Western culture, when they say a girl, there’s automatically an assumption that girl is female. And the same with a boy. If they say boy, oh, that’s a boy. We never pause to think that, could that boy be a female?” –Dr. Wesley Thomas

“Our gender expression is a way of expressing an eternal truth of how we reflect God or Goddess or, you know, the Great Mystery or the Great Spirit, or however you want to say who that power is. We say Klumuah. It means the energy that holds everything together.” –Richard Lafortune

From RISE

What if a drug tested by a pharmaceutical company as medically “legitimate” also affected the body, mind, and spirit in a combination of ways not everyone is comfortable with—making sex more intense and pleasurable, stimulating libido, increasing empathy and feelings of love, and alleviating fear? Would the FDA sanction it? Would the DEA stay away from it? Would society approve of it? And would it make life better, worse, or just more maddeningly complicated?

RISE is set in the fictional town of Rise, Arizona, and mines the richly connected relationships of its ensemble cast of characters to explore the complexities, curses, and blessings of sexuality, as well as the universal desire to find real fulfillment and feel good. Like people everywhere, the characters in RISE are willing to take risks as they seek satisfying and meaningful lives, risks that often have downsides, whether they acknowledge them or not.

In Rise, people either know, or think they know, everyone else’s business. Despite massive layoffs at the nearby open-pit copper mine, there are enough new people in Rise to support businesses like the Wine Bar Café and the updated coffee shop that try so hard to be hip. A small new-age enclave and a clothing-optional hot-springs resort are dramatic new additions to a rural culture in which conservative congregations swell on Sundays, and where businesses post Bible verses on their marquees.

PRE-PRODUCTION – DOCUMENTARY FILM

The film examines how ancient ideas can be challenged and changed at the deepest levels of the human psyche. IN HER HONOR tells the stories of three men who committed honor killings–one Muslin, one Hindu, and one Christian. It enters tribal, religious, and family worlds where men are the final authority and killing is defended with the logic, “A man is like a piece of gold, when he is dirtied he can easily be washed clean. But a woman is like silk, when she is dirtied she cannot be cleaned and she must be destroyed.”

The story begins in front of Picasso’s great painting Guernica on September 11, 2001, and continues on a journey to the town of Gernika in Basque country in northern Spain, a town destroyed during the Spanish Civil War by a new kind of warfare, a strike from the sky against a symbolic target, with many innocent people dead as a means of terrorizing the civilian population.

When I asked the young Basque woman acting as my interpreter about current ETA terrorism, she offered comments sympathetic to their cause, repeating the phrase, “It’s complicated,” as if to assure me that if I understood more, I would see their violent acts as entirely justified. Masses for the dead in the U.S. were being said throughout Europe in the days after September 11th, and the piece uses ambient sound collected in public places and in churches to approach the subject of how complicated these events are both in the moment and historically.

Picasso said, “War’s end. Hostilities go on forever.” But in this story we find there is also an equal and enduring kinship shared by those who have suffered the violence that comes to the innocent. The ideologies and politics that perpetrate violence are sometimes forgotten and forgiven, and a deep connection links those who have survived terror—and their compassion for each other is enduring.

An original pilot for a television series written by Lydia Nibley and Russell Martin

A rule‐breaking doctor, who has recently moved to Rise, Arizona with her new husband and two teenage daughters, discovers that the experimental medication she is prescribing to her patients surprisingly lifts their libidos, their spirits, and their passion for life—and that when it comes to better living through chemistry things are never as simple as they may seem.

What if a drug tested by a pharmaceutical company as medically “legitimate” also affected the body, mind, and spirit in a combination of ways not everyone is comfortable with—stimulating libido, increasing empathy and feelings of love, and alleviating fear? Would the FDA sanction it? Would the DEA stay away from it? Would society approve of it? And would it make life better, worse, or just more maddeningly complicated?