Ecofilms, the international film festival on ecology which took place in Rhodes, Greece from June 21 to June 26, offered a broad perspective on how we protect and nurture life. Trying to capture what are really life and consciousness is part of that angle, and that's precisely the spiritual question the documentary Monte Grande by Franz Reichle tries to answer.

In this film screened during the festival in the open air Rodon theater, the Swiss director follows philosopher and scientist Francisco Varela (1946 – 2001). The brilliant man, after scientific studies at Harvard University in the United States dedicated his life to find bridges between science and art, western and eastern thought and helped shape modern cognitive sciences. His thought is clear and convincing and its an immense strength of the film not to paraphrase the thinker but rather let him explain his ideas in his own words. The director chose between 300 hours of material, from archives of the conferences given by the philosopher, to a personal interview the filmmaker had with Varela before his death in 2001 and with his relatives. The thinking is so rich, yet perfectly clear, that a DVD abum with 5 discs will be released in 2006 to complete the documentary.
In order not to present it in a too abrupt and rational way, the director went back and forth from segments of conferences, to interviews with relatives, to moments in the family house in Monte Grande, Chile. To make it clearer, Reichle, who began his career as a graphic designer, used colored interstitials to introduce each of these three themes choosing respectively the primary colors red, yellow and blue to identify them. Yet the cards are not randomly shuffled and the film broadly follows the evolution of Varela's thought as it was shaped by different events that had a deep impact on his life and his ideas. At each of these periods, his relatives give their own insight into his personality. In a first stage, at the beginning of his career as a scholar, Varela explains the basics of his synthetic thought. In a second step, the coup d'Etat in Chile deeply affected his perception of logic and rationality. Finally, his cancer made him more tolerant of the others and conscious of the frailty of life, till it finally killed him.

The film definitely incites us to discover more about this man who tried to reconcile western and eastern thought, a theme that the director had already began to explore in his previous film The knowledge of healing (1997), and that he now brilliantly deepens.


Olivier Delesse


Full coverage of Ecofilms 2005 on filmfestivals.com :

Ecofilms' opening stroke a sensitive chord

A decent factory tackles corporate responsibility at Ecofilms

Ecofilms also gives room to short films

Ecofilms grants a Medwet award for the second year

A spiritual angle on ecology at Ecofilms

Ecofilms presents an experimental answer to poverty in doc

Consumer society under the spotlight at Ecofilms with Czech Dream

Rhodes Golden Deers Awards