Original subtitles

We need to understand the darkness.

Mostly, we're facing the light.

If we turn around, there's just darkness.

That's not to say that the light doesn't balance it,

but it needs to be balanced.

It's hard the other way,

but that's where the nourishment is.

That's the womb of potential.

When I was a child,

I would choose my dreams each night.

It was like creating my own movie

where anything was possible.

My favorite dream brought me on a journey

to wondrous lands,

with a pet chipmunk

that liked to sit in my shirt pocket

as we traveled.

Nowadays, my subconscious is running the show,

and my dreams are getting darker and darker.

I live on a paradise island off the west coast of Canada.

It's the year 1999.

The millennium is approaching,

and though I'm not expecting the apocalypse,

every week, there seems to be a new war,

another extinct species,

diseases running wild, more hungry people.

I've been struck with an underlying sense of fear

that I just can't shake.

One night, I dream

that I'm awakened with shouts and cries.

Then I'm pushed and shoved into a cattle car

filled with starving people.

An old woman sitting next to me sighs,

"it's finally happened.

"We're on our way to the camps.

"So it's our turn now.

"I always thought,

"it's happening to them, not to me, to them.

Always to them."

In the light of day,

I realize that it's impossible to run away.

So I've decided to take the opposite approach,

I'm running towards.

I'm setting out on a journey

that will eventually consume five years of my life

and take me to the ground zeroes of the world,

searching for possibility in the darkness,

for the sacred inside the scared.

The first time I flew in an airplane,

I was a nine-year-old Baha'i, on a pilgrimage with my family

to the Baha'i holy places of Israel.

I was a little holy roller,

with that sparkling, unsullied devotion of the child.

As a Baha'i, I was taught

that humanity is on a path of spiritual evolution,

similar to the growth of the individual.

Right now, we're in the adolescent phase.

It's 25 years later,

and I no longer belong to any one belief system,

but as I head out into the world,

I can't help feeling that, like so many kids these days,

the planet might not get the chance to grow up.

They are laughing, you know.

They are kids, laughing.

How do you say that?

What's that mean?

Move a bit.

No, no, no, no, no.

I evade the kids, slip past the the guards,

and crawl under a barbed-wire fence

into the toxic site

of the world's worst industrial disaster,

the union carbide pesticide factory.

One night back in 1984, a valve ruptured,

releasing a cloud of pesticide gas

into the sleeping community.

As many as 8,000 people were killed on the spot,

and thousands more continue to die

as the years pass.

My husband used to work in union carbide,

and he knew that there was something deadly

going to happen one day.

I remember the day before on the Sunday

we went very happily

because all our family was together.

We were all feasting,

and we went in a happy way.

That day, everyone was stopping us

in Bairagarh on Sunday night, and they kept telling us,

"don't go back, stay behind, go tomorrow morning,"

but my husband had to go to union carbide for his work.

When we came back from there, we went off to sleep.

I put all the children to bed.

I couldn't sleep somehow.

I was very, very restless that night.

I don't know what it was,

but something just didn't let me sleep all night.

In the middle of the night, we woke up choking.

I started coughing,

and my eyes started watering,

and I heard voices outside the house.

People were screaming, "run!

"Run for your life. There's a deadly gas."

And we could not run away

because all our children were very small.

I remember that morning, when I woke up,

and I had my dead son in my arms,

I couldn't even open my eyes to see him,

to see the last of him, because my eyes were so swollen,

that I had to force them with my fingers.

I remember that there was a tree outside my house

which had lovely fruit,

and that one tree had gone black the next morning.

I came in the train,

and I went out of the train station,

and there were all over, people groaning in pain,

and people falling down and fainting.

Hundreds and hundreds of people like this, in pain,

and there were some volunteers

who were giving some medicine, some food, some water,

so I came out of the station, and I joined these volunteers.

After working for a week in trying to provide relief,

what was very clear was it was too big.

There were too many people

crying out for medical relief and care,

and it was impossible for private bodies,

or non-governmental bodies to do this,

and what was very clear was that...

by that time, it was becoming clear...

that the government

would not help people on its own

unless it was pressured into doing this,

and the third thing that was very clear

was that the Indian government

and the multi-national union carbide

were together.

After the disaster,

Union Carbide focused its resources

on evading responsibility.

When doctors asked

for the ingredients of the pesticide

so they could find a way to treat the wounded,

the company said it was a trade secret...

And even as the graveyards and crematoriums

were filling with bodies,

they insisted it was nothing more

than a potent tear gas.

A phase the survivors call "revictimization" began.

I'm sure my husband watches me

from somewhere,

and his soul must be in pain.

He was an educated man,

and we wanted us to grow up in a certain way.

There's not a day that goes by

when I don't think about the people who I've lost.

This is my youngest,

and every time I look at him,

and I feel that maybe there is hope,

maybe the world isn't that bad,

but then my memory keeps going back

to the people I have lost in this world.

When you first came here,

in that really desperate time,

if you can think about a single, sacred moment

that comes to mind.

I think, for me,

the collective spirit is sacred.

The times, like when we set up the first clinic.

Because what had happened was there was 100, 150, 200,

a slowly growing number of people

who gathered at the Union Carbide gate,

and this was one place that was...

people were forbidden to enter,

but that day, something happened,

some magic happened.

Wives singing songs and chanting slogans.

Simple women,

who maybe wouldn't cross the threshold of their house,

they came into the gate and broke the damn gate,

broke this old big iron gate,

and they just went in,

and immediately, it was like...

You could see, there was not

a single person who was crying.

Everyone was so happy that they finally entered.

It had become symbolic.

It didn't mean nothing.

I mean, it didn't affect Union Carbide shares

or anything,

but just in terms of assertion of power,

it was magic,

and what, I think the same evening,

someone brought wood,

someone brought these sheets of iron,

and the whole clinic was ready before you could...

you could even come to terms with what was happening around.

So that was the first clinic

in occupied zone inside the factory campus.

Did you have any idea

that, 15 years later, you would still be here?

No, not at all.

Today, Satyhu and the survivors

have created the Sambhavna Clinic,

their most ambitious project so far.

It's a center that offers holistic medical care

for the gas survivors, at no charge.

For the first time,

a combination of ayurvedic medicine, yoga,

massage therapy, and western medicine

is being used to treat victims of chemical exposure,

and it's working.

This is the happiest time I've had in Bhopal,

actually doing something,

actually doing something new that's really helping people,

and also, at the same,

making an impact on this whole area of chemical exposure.

It's not at all a question of leaving Bhopal.

"Sambhavna" means similar feelings,

which is compassion.

The name of our clinic suggests

that there is possibility if there is compassion.

You can talk to the simplest Bhopal person,

and the person will say if you ask him,

"What is your fondest wish?"

And she will say, "What I have undergone

shouldn't happen to anybody."

80% of them are people living on physical labor,

who are not today in the new globalized world,

neither in the production stream

nor in the consumption stream.

They're not in the market,

so they're expendable.

What we're trying to do, again, in our small way,

is to assert the right of the expendable to live.

We have a right to live.

A man plunks himself down

into my train compartment and says,

"Hey, why aren't you happy? You seem unhappy."

I smile, "I'm just tired, that's all,"

but he has picked up on something.

I'm sad to be leaving.

Two months ago, Bhopal was just a toxic wasteland.

Now I see a city

populated with the inspiring faces

of people who refuse to give up.

The plane to Cambodia is deserted.

It's an old Russian model

that fills with a thick cloud of odorless white smoke

while we sit on the runway.

Apparently this is normal.

I mutter the prayers of all the different faiths I know

as we begin our decent towards Phnom Phenh,

but we touch down

on the cracked pavement of the tiny airport

without event.

And I arrange a ride into town.

"Why not go to the killing fields, too?"

My driver suggests nonchalantly,

as if it were just another tourist attraction.

I reply, "Sure. Why not?"

A dark mood descends upon me

as we scooter down the crowded road

towards the horror and genocide

of the Khmer Rouge regime,

which terrorized Cambodia throughout the '70s.

We pull up outside a muddy field.

Inside is the Toul Sleng concentration camp,

where hundreds and thousands

and thousands of people

were tortured, disappeared.

I find myself questioning my journey.

"What kind of person would travel the world

in search of these places?"

The driver asks me how long I'll be.

I can't say.

How long do most tourists spend?

My mood brightens as I ride my rented bicycle

through the sprawling ruins of Angkor Wat.

There's no place on earth like this.

The giant stone faces of the Buddhas of compassion,

crusted with lichen, split by roots,

patiently eroding.

Can she tell me why?

A sudden sun shower sends me to seek refuge

in a dark sanctuary.

Two monks slip in to share my shelter,

fluorescent orange robes glowing.

They soon run out of English

as they attempt to explain enlightenment.

They laugh,

and with sweeping gestures with the head and to the sky,

paint their quests as monks.

It's only recently

that they could openly practice their beliefs.

These monks survived the years of Pol Pot,

though their families did not.

Even the statues were tortured.

Buddha was considered a counter-revolutionary.

The fact that most people in the country were Buddhist

was easily dealt with.

Most people in the country

were also deemed counter-revolutionaries.

One young monk reaches into his robes

to produce a cigarette.

Puffing cheerfully, he explains

that they're skipping out of their afternoon meditation.

The sound of music leads to me to a grassy plateau

atop the temple complex.

I find a group of musicians

who've all lost limbs through land mines,

the lasting legacy of war.

There are an estimated three million land mines

scattered throughout Cambodia.

Just outside the temple gates of Angkor Wat,

I follow a sign that reads "Land Mine Museum."

There, I encounter the proprietor

of the homespun museum,

a man named Aki Rah.

Aki was only five years old

when he captured by the Khmer Rouge.

He was taught to fire guns, rocket launchers,

to make simple bombs,

and because he was small and light, to lay land mines.

When they kill,

like, they kill my friend,

they kill my family,

I cannot do anything.

If I angry, they kill me too,

so I have to keep quiet.

Make my life safe,

and they want me...

you laugh.

I laugh. Ha, ha, ha, you know.

We cannot say, "no, you not kill my brother,

sister, or my father."

No, we cannot say.

We can look and smile,

and just like that, they want.

They say you can't cry.

No.

Aki's father was killed

for the crime of being a high school teacher.

His mother was killed

for giving extra rice rations to a hungry old man.

Yeah, they make die.

They kill.

Just a little bit do something wrong, they kill.

When the Vietnamese invaded,

Aki switched sides

and fought against the Khmer Rouge.

When the U. N. Finally arrived, he joined them,

disarming the very land mines

that he himself might have planted.

Today, the international peacekeepers have left,

but the job of de-mining Cambodia

is far from finished.

Some army, some soldier,

they tell me they lay mines around here.

They tell me they started from here and here...

Have mines, yeah.

They just bury in the ground a little bit.

Not so deep.

Just like this here.

Yeah.

Yeah, you hear, "click, click."

Maybe...

Yeah, plastic.

Slowly,

take the mine like this.

You can do like this...

Yeah, no problem, like this.

No?

Yeah, and be careful on the top,

but we can do like this, no problem,

a little bit, yeah.

Hmm.

And...

Here, the fuse.

We take the fuse off, and it's safe.

Some days, I clear 50 mines a day,

and some days, we clear a hundred mines a day.

Many, many mines.

Aki remains committed

to ridding his ravaged country of the deadly devices.

With a simple wooden stick,

he wanders the dangerous fields and jungles

decommissioning thousands of land mines

each year.

It's become his life's work,

a way of healing both himself and his broken country.

On my way to the airport,

the moto-rickshaw driver asks me

if I had a good "holiday in Cambodia."

I think for a moment before responding.

"You know, I wouldn't call it a holiday,

but yes, it was good."

The sacred did appear.

It was just buried next to a land mine

in the jungle.

A man notices me filming the bones of war.

Pointing to the pavement, he says,

"This is where 22 people were killed by a bomb.

"They were simply waiting in line

"for a few crusts of bread.

"One of our artists has filled in the places

"where the bombs fell,

because we need to remember."

Amina still lives in that same apartment

bordering the infamous snipers' alley

with her husband Nejadad.

They're both artists who never stopped creating

throughout the four years of the siege of Sarajevo.

Serbs, they're always shooting in one rhythm, you know.

Tum ta-ta-ta tum, tum ta-ta-ta tum.

It's one music phrase, their nation song, you know,

and after three times, tum ta-ta-ta tum,

they've spent 30 bullets, and their magazine is empty,

and I know that they have to put this magazine,

to take a new one to put in the rifle,

to, you know, to find...

And it's a few seconds, you know,

and this was a chance for me to run across the street.

Throughout my life,

I've tried to make sense of the world by making art.

For Amina and Nejadad,

trapped inside a crumbling city,

making art became a tool of survival.

When one grenade

is thrown on a roof or building,

or museum,

I was running to collect some interesting pieces...

And, in fact, my idea was to transfer, you know,

to exchange negative images of the war

into a positive celebration of the human soul.

If I just hide against, you know, snipers,

against shells,

I'm not sure shall I stay normal,

and my work was something as my therapy.

We were in a space as a prison.

You know, we didn't have freedom,

but inside your mind, you were free,

without rules, without any borders,

and you had the chance to use this freedom.

During the war,

there was only one way to escape Sarajevo,

through a secret 800-metre-long tunnel

that took you to the airport, controlled by the U. N.,

and out of range of Serb snipers.

From there,

if you had the right papers and enough money,

it was only a short flight to freedom.

Today, the guns on the hillsides are gone,

but you still need the right papers

to get out of here.

A few hours after leaving Bosnia,

I'm already deep in the London underground.

It feels, somehow, too easy.

Mind the gap.

Mind the gap.

I buy a car in London.

As soon as my foot hits the gas,

I'm seized with a nervous fervor,

a sense that the world is too big,

and I have to go everywhere, now.

I begin racing around Europe,

a day in Auschwitz,

half a day in Flanders Fields,

a few hours at the spot

where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.

I stop in for a quick miracle at Lourdes.

As is often the case, it takes me a while

to recognize the miracles I receive.

First, my video camera is stolen from the car,

and then, a few day later, the car itself is stolen,

and I'm left on the street

without even a coat on my back.

My frantic rushing has been brought to a sudden stop.

In the silence that emerges,

I realize that I had become a tourist of darkness.

I was filling my pockets with images

while leaving my heart untouched.

The Sufis would say I had lost my grace.

Then they might add, "die, before you die."

I need to go inwards.

I begin studying with the Sufis of Turkey,

and the Tibetan Buddhists, exiled in India.

From the outside,

meditation can look like escapism.

I soon discover that it's the opposite.

As the weeks pass,

every demon I've tucked away comes up to say hi.

I learn not to push them away

or feed them or become them

or studiously ignore them.

In Buddhism, everything that happens in life,

even death,

is seen as an opportunity for awakening.

The Tibetans I live with

embody this spirit of resilience.

Chased from their homeland by the Chinese occupiers,

many of them have spent over 40 years

in the refugee camps of India,

yet they have managed to recreate their culture

in exile,

keeping it alive and vibrant.

After a day of meditating under the Bodhi tree,

I go out to get my shoes,

only to discover that they're gone.

Naturally.

I walk out of the temple complex

onto the dusty streets,

embarrassed by my bare feet.

The locals will probably think

I'm some kind of gringo renunciant,

trying to lead a pure life unburdened by shoes.

When I arrive back at the monastery,

the monks laugh and tell me a story.

Ryokan was a hermit who lived a simple life

in a simple hut at the foot of a mountain.

One night a thief broke in,

only to find there was nothing to steal.

Ryokan said, "You may have come a long way to visit me,

"and you shouldn't return empty handed.

Please, take my clothes."

The thief was bewildered

but took the clothes and slunk away.

Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon.

"Poor fellow," he mused,

"I wish I could give him this beautiful moon."

So, uh...

I lost this sentence.

Oh, uh...

The next sentence... no. No.

After six months,

I decide it's time to get off the cushion

and back into the world.

Humans are the only creatures that know we will die...

As much as we try to avoid the thought.

We used to be able to find a measure of comfort,

a sense of immortality

in the marks we might leave in the world,

through our works, or our children.

At 8: 15 a.m. On August 6th in 1945,

humanity lost its illusion of immortality.

It's dawn, August 6th, 2000.

In a few hours,

it will be the anniversary

of the day we dropped the first atomic bomb.

The Hibakushas, the A-bomb survivors,

arrive early,

memories flooding back as they sit in silent prayer.

For a decade after the blast,

they were denied the right to tell their stories,

shamed into silence.

It was a second act of violence.

Kae Goh Ogura was just a little girl

playing in the streets of Hiroshima

on that awful day.

She was also told to be quiet.

"You shouldn't complain.

"Many people had the same experience.

You are not special," they said.

Then we tried to forget,

not to tell our story.

10 years later,

when we had the bikini atoll nuclear test, too...

And we were so surprised,

and we became so desperate.

That was the end...

Japan was the end of nuclear war,

but, oh, they are still producing nuclear weapons.

Do they know what a dreadful, miserable day that we had?

We need to tell our story.

As darkness falls,

lanterns of memory are released on the Otogawa River.

Hiroshima no longer tries to forget.

For Kae Goh Ogura,

the act of telling and retelling her story

has become a way to transform her tragedy

into a force of change.

I was eight years old.

I clearly remember that...

The steps I climbed up once.

I tried to see the whole city,

and behind my house there was a shrine on the hill

and stone steps.

Each step, people were dying.

Those dying people squeezed my leg,

caught my ankle.

I was so scared.

Everybody was shouting, "help, help."

I saw the city.

The city was just dark.

Black and red.

In flame.

Trees were burning.

People were asking, "Water, get me water."

So I wanted to give those dying people...

to give water,

but as soon as they drank water,

died...

In front of me.