Tribal Storytelling Workshop

In November, 2008, a group of filmmakers, actors, and writers, attended my five-day Tribal Workshop, which reconnects participants with their tribal origins whilst promoting insights and a character-based engagement with their own, often unappreciated stories. The workshop provides the circumstances for creatives from all disciplines to make the inner journey and the outer odyssey towards telling more authentic and dramatically powerful stories for the screen. Every participant is required to make a short film (in any style, genre) that dramatises their "tribal identity".

In future I hope to post a range of these films on http://www.wheresthedrama.com ...

In the meantime, I offer this film by TJ as an example of the sort of work that is being inspired by this workshop. By way of introduction, TJ writes:

"Heard of Billy Marshall Stoneking's Tribal Storytelling Workshop? He has again reminded me of what the essence of telling a story is... it is not a telling at all, but rather a showing - a showing of simple things. In drama, emotions are connected to objects, to actions, to what we can see and hear. One struggles to find a way, the means by which, one might make the inner life an outer reality...

"In the quest to make emotion present, one sometimes flounders and falls to despair. Within the story, one hits upon 'a wall'.... a point at which everything you "think up" is wrong... and the only way forward, the only way over the wall, is to leave it to one's intuition. The inspiration for this film is founded on this insight... as well as my desire to explore, cinematically, the creative condition of the long dark night of the soul.

"The other reason for this film is that I felt that people simply do not know how to make spiritual films... they make an abstraction of spirituality, they make it "out of this world" - and its very realness is neglected.... this film is an experiment in revealing the realness."