Gumboot :: Projects

The art of compassion

A one hour documentary film...

3.5mb MOV 30s

Macintosh AIFF | 347k 30s
Windows WAV | 330k 30s

"The Art of Compassion is a story about grace and dignity and coming to terms with life at its most cruel and its most forgiving. It is a remarkable odyssey."

-Alex Strachen, The Vancouver Sun

In 1942, William Allister, painter and author, and Raymond Moriyama, architect, were two Canadians imprisoned on opposite sides of the Pacific. Allister, a young, barely trained soldier, was taken prisoner by the Japanese at the fall of Hong Kong, and Raymond Moriyama, a Japanese Canadian teenager, was taken into an internment camp in British Columbia by the Canadian government after Pearl Harbour. Both men have struggled with a sense of betrayal, have survived and, through their creative talents, have each found very different ways to come to terms with their experiences during WWII. Fifty-two years after the events they meet and embark on a journey of sharing and discovery.

William Allister's series of paintings entitled East Weds West, painted after revisiting Japan in 1983, became his link to healing and transcendence.

The design and building of the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo brought two important threads of resolution together for Raymond Moriyama.

Nature plays an important role for both men - to their survival during the war years and in informing their creative work and spiritual growth today. THE ART OF COMPASSION is a study of two men who have delicately transformed painful experiences into symbols of beauty and peace that continue to affect people in both Canada and Japan.

Read the Vancouver Sun review of The Art of Compassion.

Status:

- Project completed and in world wide distribution through Gumboot Productions Inc.
- Premiere held at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, Japan.
- Broadcast nationally on the CBC Television Network and subsequently on The Knowledge Network and ACCESS Television.

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