Laurie Mercier interviews Desiree Hellegers about her web series, a surreal and hallucinogenic monologue set entirely inside their mind during a thirty-day silent Buddhist retreat in the woods of British Columbia during the 2005 winter holiday. While outwardly appearing to meditate, Hellegers time travels back to the 1940s and her father's childhood flight from the Nazis, to the 1960s and growing up watching villages burn in Vietnam on TV, and to a 1979 a fateful trip to Europe in 1979, when she visits Anne Frank's "secret annex" and accidentally kills her father. The series tackles the intergenerational health effects of war and fascism, divesting from the Military Industrial Complex, clerical sexual abuse, and meditation/mindfulness as a tool of resistance.
The series, which is airing to more than 400,000 households in the Portland/Vancouver area on Open Signal Cable TV, can be viewed on youtube at How I Learned to Breathe Thru the Apocalypse.
- KBOO