Conversation & Film Review/Ramola D: ‘The Spark’ by Stephen Shellenberger

–Ramola D/Posted 4/22/2018

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with actor and filmmaker Stephen Shellenberger on the subject of his new film, The Spark, released online currently at his website for an incredible discount, please visit there to view, please share widely. 

In a wonderful impromptu conversation opened by a musician friend Bob spilling exquisite notes and lyrics hinting at alienation into the moment, Stephen Shellenberger offers candid insights into his creative process and approach in the making of this elegant art film set in Montreal.

Thoughtful, straightforward, and matter-of-fact, Stephen delves into the beauty and meaning of art and talks about his own experiences of having been moved by great art, such as the statue of David by Michel Angelo in Florence, and about the need to be moved and to relate to the world at the level of heart, not merely mind, and how art in this way offers in a sense a true pastiche of world experience across time, more than the histories of war and governments does.

Released April 20 at his website, for the modest price of 1.99 for a week: especially recommended to those experiencing unlawful targeting or surveillance, for friends and family, to raise public awareness through art. Support Stephen Shellenberger at Patreon.

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REVIEW | Stephen Shellenberger’s The Spark

Ramola D, Author, Temporary Lives; Invisible Season | April 22, 2018

A gorgeous art film with the added bonus of a gripping narrative, The Spark offers a compelling glimpse into a world uncannily like our own, a modern dystopia spiked with high-tech surveillance and low-tech stalkers surrounding a central figure steeped in his own story of love, loss, and remembrance.

Stephen Shellenberger, award-winning actor, artist, poet, and filmmaker with an eye for the visually appealing and keen sense for the power of story acts, casts, writes and directs in this subtly artful film set in Montreal.

A man with memories of a beautiful ended relationship begins to catch glimpses of his beloved in a new and distant urban setting far from the days of his romance in Paris, while at the same time his own life seems to mysteriously unravel. Unclear himself what exactly is going on around him as he notices signs of apartment break-ins and experiences a loss of trust from close colleagues, he begins to treat every encounter with strangers, neighbors, an attractive though uninvited companion on a train with dawning suspicion.

The world in which he lives is a modern world “where the originals are being replaced,” where cloning and genetic editing and transhumanizing are a sudden fact of life, where the future is marked by “lunatics, heretics, and sick pedophiles,” where some who rule are ruled by no limits on their greed for control—all unhappy reminders of our own reality in this millenium. It is a surveillance-infested world where deception and disinformation crowd the atmosphere, where no-one it appears is what they seem, where dark-intentioned agents crowd everyday around targets and seek to modulate their thoughts and actions.

All around him throbs a succession of odd encounters; trapped in a Kafkaesque loop of repetitions he soon begins to distrust his seeing and spins deeper into himself as he steps further into the world, speaking only to a select few around him. Spiraling down the rabbit hole he learns more eventually than he had ever bargained for, tossed around by question after question, not offered the truth of what he is experiencing until the very end, when unexpected validation of his deepest misgivings is proffered.

Because he is lost and haunted by his need to find the truth and meaning of his experience, we too are lost and tossed with him inside the seas of his unknowing–the emotional intensity of the experience keeps the viewer enthralled.

A #MustWatch for those awakened keen to make sense of our varied lives today, uniformly impacted by larger substructural realities such as Satanism and control, The Spark could be shown in schools and colleges as a great way to offer insight into the reality and nature of our surveillance-ridden world today, trapped as we are with the surround-sound of science fiction morphing into fact and the roster of bizarre technologies promising to take over humanity expanding at every step.

And what of the spark of life, learning, discovery that throbs like a distant heart pulling him closer and deeper into the truth of his own experience? Haunted, targeted, pursued, a fiery light still burns inside him. Supported by a cast of striking women and men actors who each leave their own indelible mark on the film, The Spark is both elevating and unsettling, a provocative and dramatic vignette for our times.

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