We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ari Gold. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ari below.

Hi Ari, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

To heal my family lineage, I agreed to perform a perilous spiritual challenge from visionary filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky: to re-enact my mother’s death in a helicopter crash as a movie. I am in the process of completing “Helicopter,” this feature-length hybrid-documentary, incorporating animation and re-enactments, and expanding my student-Oscar-winning short film of the same name.

My hope is that this movie’s effect on an audience coincides with my own transformation as I make it. I seek to break down the barrier between artist and audience, as a way of exploring the potential for healing from trauma. The edit will therefore take a symphonic approach, using elements of the rock music that changed my life, along with compositions from my twin brother Ethan, whose musical perspective of our childhood creates a Rashomon-like, kaleidoscopic perspective on memory itself. I believe that fractured memory is the most honest representation of the past.

I believe we have a great opportunity to change the world through cinema. I’m inspired by Terence McKenna’s words: “The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns.”

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My films and poetry all stem from the same desire to awaken the heart – whether I’m doing something funny, tragic, violent or absurd. The first “client” I always have to please and heal is myself, and the rest follows from that.

My feature-film “Adventures of Power” is a comedy about air-drummers, but it’s also about finding your own voice in the face of political and spiritual collapse. My second movie, “The Song of Sway Lake,” is about a family hunting for a lost jazz record from the 1940’s, but uncovering their own buried traumas in the process.

I feel that the role of an artist in society has been relegated to “making content,” and for me – knowing that there are easier ways to make a buck! – I work to make my projects because of the faith that art can heal the soul, heal the earth, and bring people closer together.

Have you ever had to pivot?

During lockdown, as I was struggling to move my “dream project” films forward, I started writing poetry and sharing it on the internet. I was in a little club of musicians and filmmakers who would go online, come up with a random prompt, write quickly, then read our poems aloud to each other.

I realized that up the coast, my dad, in his nineties, didn’t have anyone to keep him company. He could no longer see the keys of his typewriter. He could barely hear me on the phone. He was severed from the things that sustained his spirits: the human carnival, and his own creativity.

Wanting my dad to get in on the action, I sent him a poem via U.S. Mail, printed in 36-point-font. I included a self-addressed stamped envelope, and demanded a poem in return – challenging him, I hoped, to a Troubadour-like competition.

My dad complied with the vigor of a young poet. His poems were faster than mine, shorter than mine, and written with the urgency of someone who has little time to dawdle.

Soon we were making up for human contact by mailing poems back and forth – about love, romance, sex, death, and tomato soup. I wandered through words. He sliced to the essential experience of outliving his friends, his enemies, his wives, his lovers, even one of his children. I wrote about nature, disaster, and my own dreams; he responded with poems about the love of his life – my mother – who’d left him first in divorce, then later in a helicopter crash.
And I tried to forgive my father his imperfections, through poems that promised I would live on. When my father’s correspondence went cold, my twin brother Ethan – one of the musicians in the poetry group – ordered a book of stamps too, and got our dad going again.

Together, the three of us decided that this correspondence might speak to other fathers, sons, daughters, mothers. People who struggle to find words for love, loss, and longing. People who want to stay on the carnival ride until they fall off. Maybe it will inspire you to lick the back of postage stamps, and write to the living, or even the dead, and find new words for the truth of being still alive. Our book, “Father Verses Son,” will be released by Blackstone in early 2024.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

I do think that our culture has really melted down the idea of the artist, where, for example, film culture has become a constant discussion of box office receipts, or TV culture about streaming numbers. We need to talk about film, tv, art, and music as essential elements of the human experience. Going back to the dawn of humanity, artists and creators have been central to the healing of the human soul, the imagination. Artists have provided perspective on the most challenging conditions of being alive: love, death, separation, loss, joy. We need art.

I think that our society should provide more funding for creators, more opportunities for local communities to build repertory theaters, cinemas, etc.. Of course, there is always the challenge of who gets to decide what art is worth supporting, but at the bare minimum, taking the price tag off of every darn thing would be a start.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://AriGoldFilms.com
• Instagram: http://instagram.com/arigold
• Facebook: http://facebook.com/arigoldfilms
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arigoldfilms/
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/arigold
• Youtube: http://youtube.com/arigoldfilms
• Other: http://tiktok.com/@arigoldfilms