What the #$*! Do we know?!

"WHAT THE #$*! DO WE KNOW?!" is a new type of film. It is part documentary, part story, and part elaborate and inspiring visual effects and animations. The protagonist, Amanda, played by Marlee Matlin, finds herself in a fantastic Alice in Wonderland experience when her daily, uninspired life literally begins to unravel, revealing the uncertain world of the quantum field hidden behind what we consider to be our normal, waking reality.

She is literally plunged into a swirl of chaotic occurrences, while the characters she encounters on this odyssey reveal the deeper, hidden knowledge she doesn't even realize she has asked for. Like every hero, Amanda is thrown into crisis, questioning the fundamental premises of her life – that the reality she has believed in about how men are, how relationships with others should be, and how her emotions are affecting her work isn't reality at all!

As Amanda learns to relax into the experience, she conquers her fears, gains wisdom, and wins the keys to the great secrets of the ages, all in the most entertaining way. She is then no longer the victim of circumstances, but she is on the way to being the creative force in her life. Her life will never be the same.
The fourteen top scientists and mystics interviewed in documentary style serve as a modern day Greek Chorus. In an artful filmic dance, their ideas are woven together as a tapestry of truth. The thoughts and words of one member of the chorus blend into those of the next, adding further emphasis to the film's underlying concept of the interconnectedness of all things.

The chorus members act as hosts who live outside of the story, and from this Olympian view, comment on the actions of the characters below. They are also there to introduce the Great Questions framed by both science and religion, which divides the film into a series of acts. Through the course of the film, the distinction between science and religion becomes increasingly blurred, since we realize that, in essence, both science and religion describe the same phenomena.

The film employs animation to realize the radical knowledge that modern science has unearthed in recent years. Powerful cinematic sequences explore the inner-workings of the human brain. Quirky animation introduces us to the smallest form of consciousness in the body – the cell. Dazzling visuals reinforce the film's message in an exciting, powerful way. Done with humor, precision, and irreverence, these scenes are only part of what makes this film unique in the history of cinema, and a true box-office winner.

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Baraka

This is what Roger Ebert has to say about Baraka:

In this world of wonders there are still places that have not been smoothed over with the shallow surfaces of Western commercialism. The amazing thing is not how widely the McCulture has spread, but how many corners it has missed. It is claimed that the great age of travel is dead - that there are no longer amazing, exotic, beautiful and fearsome places for the traveler to discover. A movie like "Baraka" gives hope.

On one level, the film is a 96-minute travelog. On another level, it is a meditation on the planet. The director, Ron Fricke, has taken his 70-mm camera all over the globe to photograph natural and human sights. Some of them are as ordinary as the traffic in Manhattan. Some are as awesome as a solar eclipse. Some are as desperate as the tribes of scavengers scuttling like crabs over the garbage dumps of Calcutta.

Frick was cinematographer and collaborator on "Koyannisquatsi," the 1983 film by Geoffrey Reggio which is a direct ancestor of "Baraka." In that film, Reggio used time-lapse photography to capture clouds racing across the desert, and crowds of people dashing madly about the caverns of big cities. Frick uses the same technique; it's like watching the weather on fast-forward.
Time-lapse photography can be dismissed as a gimmick, but for me it's something more than that. It's a visual demonstration of how fleeting life is. Of how the decisions that seem momentous on our time scale are flickering instants in the life of the planet, too small to be observed except on the minute scale of human life. Somehow the technique makes the earth and its inhabitants seem touchingly fragile.

Against this fragility, man has raised the bulwark of religion, and Frick's cameras show us man in the act of worship, from the Pope in St. Paul's to rabbis at the Wailing Wall, from monks in ancient temples to an extraordinary tribe of chanters who lean this way and that in time to their prayer, waving their arms like trees tossed in a storm, led by a man who seems immensely pleased to be in the center of such ecstasy.

The music has been written by Michael Stearns, who plunders the riches of ethnic music and chants and combines those sounds with more Western ideas, so that the score becomes an anthology of the sounds man makes to keep away the dark and make the light s ensible. To listen to the sound track by itself, after seeing the movie, would be to evoke the souls of all of these strange places.

Of course there is a "message" somewhere in "Baraka" - the same message we have heard before, about how man must love and respect the planet. This is a piety to which we all subscribe, so long as it does not mean any inconvenience to us personally. Few people wearing pro-ecology T-shirts, I imagine, ever think of becoming vegetarian so that grains can be used to feed all the mouths on the planet, instead of being converted into meat to feed a few. And few people seeing "Baraka" will make any major changes in their lives to respect the planet the movie celebrates. (I include myself among that number.) So the movie has the power of a dream, from which we awaken, instead of a warning, to which we respond.

• Visit www.spiritofbaraka.com