Velcrow Ripper

Last updated
Velcrow Ripper
Born
Steve Ripper

(1963-10-20) October 20, 1963 (age 59)
NationalityCanadian
Occupationdocumentary filmmaker
Years active1990s-present
Notable work Bones of the Forest , Scared Sacred , Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action , Occupy Love

Velcrow Ripper (born October 20, 1963, in Gibsons, British Columbia) is a Canadian documentary filmmaker, writer, and public speaker, best known for his Genie Award-winning 2006 film Scared Sacred and his newest feature documentary, Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action . His 1995 feature documentary, Bones of the Forest , won twelve major awards, including a Genie Award, and Best of the Festival at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. Many of his films examine the intersection of spirituality and politics.

Contents

He has also been a contributor to ascent and Shambhala Sun magazines, which explore similar issues. His writing has also appeared in the anthologies, We are Everywhere and Dam Nation.

He is a co-founder of the Gulf Islands Film and Television School, and has taught film at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, and at the Ontario College of Art and Design. He also teaches workshops and lectures on the themes of spirituality and activism.

Born Steve Ripper, he was raised in British Columbia as a member of the Baháʼí Faith. [1] He later adopted the nickname Velcrow while participating in punk rock culture in his youth.

He currently lives on Gibsons, British Columbia. [1]

Films

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gibsons</span> Town in British Columbia, Canada

Gibsons is a coastal community of 4,605 in southwestern British Columbia, Canada on the Sunshine Coast, along the Strait of Georgia.

Mark Achbar is a Canadian filmmaker, best known for The Corporation (2003) and Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1994).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2004 Toronto International Film Festival</span>

The 29th Toronto International Film Festival ran from September 9 through September 18. The festival screened 328 films of which 253 were features and 75 were shorts.

Evan Beloff is a Canadian film writer, producer, director and production company executive. He is known for Bigfoot's Reflection (2007), Daughters of the Voice (2018) and A People's Soundtrack (2019).

John Cafiero is an American punk rock musician and filmmaker. He is best known as the frontman for the punk supergroup Osaka Popstar, whose debut album was released the summer 2006. The full album lineup toured the UK in September 2006, followed by a tour of the United States and Canada with the legendary punk band The Misfits in Fiend Fest '06.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Loscil</span> Musical artist

Loscil is the electronic/ambient music project of Scott Morgan from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Morgan launched the project in Vancouver in 1998 while a member of the multimedia collective Multiplex, which curated audiovisual events at an underground cinema called The Blinding Light. The name Loscil is taken from the "looping oscillator" function (loscil) in Csound.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Debra Granik</span> American film director, screenwriter and cinematographer (born 1963)

Debra Granik is an American filmmaker. She is most known for 2004's Down to the Bone, which starred Vera Farmiga, 2010's Winter's Bone, which starred Jennifer Lawrence in her breakout performance and for which Granik was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and 2018's Leave No Trace, a film based on the book My Abandonment by Peter Rock.

Colin Archibald Low was a Canadian animation and documentary filmmaker with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). He was known as a pioneer, one of Canada's most important filmmakers, and was regularly referred to as "the gentleman genius". His numerous honors include five BAFTA awards, eight Cannes Film Festival awards, and six Academy Award nominations.

Scared Sacred is an independent film produced in 2004 and released in 2006 by director Velcrow Ripper.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sturla Gunnarsson</span> Icelandic film director

Sturla Gunnarsson is an Icelandic-Canadian film and television director and producer.

Julia Kwan is a Canadian screenwriter, director, and occasional producer of her own short and feature films. She has brought a keen sense of the Chinese-Canadian cultural experience to her films. Several of the films were made in conjunction with the National Film Board of Canada Her feature films include Eve and the Fire Horse (2005), as well as the feature length documentary film Everything Will Be (2014). She is also known for her short film 10,000 Delusions (1999) which screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Phillip Borsos was an Australian-born Canadian film director, producer, and screenwriter. A four-time Canadian Film Award and Genie Award winner and an Academy Award nominee, he was one of the major figures of Canadian and British Columbian filmmaking during the 1980s, earning critical acclaim and accolades at a time when Canadian filmmakers were still struggling to gain attention outside of North America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aryana Farshad</span>

Aryana Farshad is a writer, director, and film producer born in Tehran, Iran.

<i>RiP!: A Remix Manifesto</i> 2008 Canadian film

RiP!: A Remix Manifesto is a 2008 open-source documentary film about "the changing concept of copyright" directed by Brett Gaylor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mila Aung-Thwin</span> Canadian documentary filmmaker, producer and activist

Mila Aung-Thwin is a Canadian documentary filmmaker, producer and activist whose films deal with social justice.

Nettie Wild is a Canadian filmmaker with a focus on documentaries that highlight marginalized groups and discrimination that these groups face, including people in Canada and around the world. She has worked throughout her professional career as an actor, director, producer, and cameraperson.

Michael Oren Fitzgerald is an author, editor and entrepreneur. He and his wife, Judith Fitzgerald, have an adult son and live in Bloomington, Indiana.

Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action is a 2008 documentary film written and directed by Velcrow Ripper that focuses on spiritual activism. Fueled by the belief that "another world" is possible, Ripper explores the stories of people who have turned to spiritual activism as a means to cope with personal and global crises. The film contains interviews from Daryl Hannah, Thich Nhat Hanh, Desmond Tutu, Julia Butterfly Hill, Van Jones, Alice Walker, Joanna Macy, Noah Levine and John Lewis. Others featured include Michael Beckwith, Sera Beak, Ralph Nader among many others such as the original inspiration for the film, Brad Will.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pete McCormack</span> Canadian author, filmmaker, screenwriter and musician

Pete McCormack is a Canadian author, filmmaker, screenwriter and musician. He is best known for directing the Academy Award short-listed documentary Facing Ali and the Leacock Award-nominated novel Understanding Ken. He is the creator of the HBO Canada documentary television series Sports on Fire.

Bones of the Forest is a Canadian documentary film, directed by Heather Frise and Velcrow Ripper and released in 1995. An exploration of the forestry industry, the film depicts a variety of views on the conflict between logging and environmentalism, including those of loggers, alternative forestry practitioners, a vice-president of MacMillan Bloedel, First Nations elders and environmental activists.

References