August 21, 2003
Awakened Woman's Circle is working for peace
Point of View: feminist
An interview with filmmaker Karil Daniels
By Stephanie Hiller
There's a lot to Karil Daniels, but it all fits together nicely.
An independent documentary film and video maker who has won 24 awards, Karil has done training videos, corporate promotions, documentaries -- you name it -- but running through it all is a strong connecting thread. She is dedicated to making change through film.
"I think media is too powerful to not utilize it to make things better. As a filmmaker, I want to put my effort into making a film that changes things for the better. It's so much work, at the end of it I want to see that effort result in something that has some intrinsic value."
She named her company Point of View Productions as if to validate that there really is a person behind the camera, with a point of view. "Years ago there used to be this issue around public TV circles where they wanted everything to be balanced. You couldn't make anything that had a real point of view. I always rejected that because I believe there is no way to take out your point of view. It can be buried, it can be glossed over, it can be denied, it can be argued against, but it can't be eliminated. It's a filter and everyone has one."
A quick run through her web site shows that Karil's filter is deeply feminist, and from that rooted woman-place, her point of view is for peace, for health and wellness, for sustainable business, and for the environment.
I interviewed her last spring in her San Francisco studio located in a beautifully refurbished warehouse on Townsend Street. Making tea in the kitchen before we settled upstairs in her office, she let me know immediately what is on her mind. "This administration is out of control," she said with a little laugh. "We've just got to stop them."
Her office is small and immaculate. She helps me set up my little microphone, propping it up against a book, and we start off talking about her favorite project, "Water Baby: Experiences of Water Birth."
Happy mommies
"That project came out of a place of working in feminist issues and I personally find that a very compelling topic. It's an extremely important topic for women, to be able to have the kind of birth that they want and have control over it, rather than what was the standard." Giving birth in water was little known fifteen years ago when the film was made, and there was plenty of resistance. "It takes a really long time to impact the medical establishment with new methodology, especially those that don't benefit the doctors but benefit the women in a way that is low tech and less expensive.
"I remember having a doctor wag his finger in my face and say, 'You better not do this film. You're going to be responsible for killing babies.'
"He did not understand what waterbirth was about. It was amazing to me that this doctor did not understand the physiology."
What is the physiology? I asked her. Why don't babies drown?
"The baby is inside the mother's body in a warm liquid, so why doesn't the baby drown inside the body? Because the lungs are not working and the baby is receiving oxygen through the cord. Breathing is initiated when the skin comes into contact with the air." Or from a shock, which is why doctors used to slap babies. Not the most sensitive approach, she observes. That skin has not yet been touched by anything!
The film went a long way toward educating the public about waterbirth. In fact, "it catalyzed the whole movement. Waterbirth has grown very slowly and very solidly because it's the moms who benefit and the moms who love it. And a woman who has a beautiful birth experience tells her friends. It's not a kind of flash in the pan popularity but a growing movement that has legs."
Karil has not had children. She feels she couldn't have done a proper job of mothering while doing the work she has done. "I can't imagine how any woman really works and does mothering. It's just amazing how much it takes."
Certainly it's not easy, I reply. And now women don't have a choice. They have to work because otherwise there's not enough money.
"And why isn't there enough money?" Karil leaps in. "Because the people at the top are so greedy, they have to continuously get more and more and more. And the pie is finite. It is not an infinite pie. I recently read a statistic that is really so shocking. It said that around 1960 I believe, the top CEOs average pay scale was about 40 times the pay scale of the average worker. Now in 2000 it was 430 times the pay of the average worker. That's staggering."
And now we're onto what she really wants to talk about.
"Which brings me to something that I'd really like to outline in this article, which comes down to a basic philosophy of my work and what I think is really wrong, and how it can be fixed.
"There are three critical aspects that must be dealt with in this society and on a global scale for things to get better."
Three critical changes for a better world
"The first is, women have to have full parity in terms of money, power, influence, decision making -- everything.
"Environmental issues must never be discounted, ignored, put in the bottom of the pile. We must have a vision that is big enough to include generations forward. Then we're going to realize that the environment is precious enough to protect now!
"And the third thing is economic justice issues. We have a minimum wage. Why in the world do we not have a maximum wage?"
Now there's an interesting idea.
"How can anyone need the huge sums that are paid to the very top CEOs in this country? It's nothing less than obscene. They should legislate it out of existence. They should pick a very large number -- a number that is big enough to motivate people to want excellence and success, a number that when you achieve it you are enormously privileged and very comfortable, so that you can have all the toys and goodies. You want that to be $10 million? That's ok with me. You want it to be more than that? Well we'll talk about it. Beyond a certain amount, it's ridiculous. I've traveled in a lot of Third World countries and I've seen enormous poverty. It breaks my heart that we in this country do not see the injustice of the excesses of the very top people financially and we could do that, we could legislate it out of existence.
"Economic justice benefits everyone. It even benefits the filthy rich because on some level they have an internal knowing that things are totally out of whack and that they have some culpability."
Including women at the table in numbers equal to their population would make a phenomenal difference. "We'd have far fewer conflicts, because women would not allow this kind of hostilities and war to perpetuate. They just would not permit it."
I can see Karil herself exercising this authority in the world as any mother does in her own kitchen, adjudicating squabbles amongst children and just not letting chaos rule. It's wonderful to imagine this kind of collective maternal hand keeping all 6 billion children on the planet from killing each other.
"I'm convinced that there's a biological imperative that has to do with women being the mothers. Whether each individual woman is a mother or not is irrelevant in this argument. It is the biological imperative that brings life through her body that has a much greater reverence for life."
Another plank in Karil's platform, so to speak, is representational voting. "Representational voting. Instead of the winner takes all model, you form coalitions. If you get 51 percent of the vote, you get 51 percent of the power in that jurisdiction. That way you bring everyone into the discussion, and you find ways to give different segments as much as possible of what they want."
Karil is an innovative thinker with a lot of confidence that her idealism is realistic -- doable. But like everyone else who believes in a better world, she's extremely worried about what the present administration may be doing next. Hence Karil's next film is about the importance of dissent. It is called "Voices of Dissent: Activism and American Democracy," and "it focuses on the importance of people having the responsibility to speak up when the government is doing something destructive or unenlightened."
Karil's forthcoming film highlights the power of activism
"I want to show people that we are on the verge of another McCarthy type era -- if we don't stand up now and say no to the erosion of democracy, if they are re-elected, this could put America back a hundred years.
"We have to remember that power, if it's not enlightened, its agenda is to remain in power. Everything else remains a distant second.
"I want this film to empower people to not be intimidated by government manipulators who would have us basically lie down so they can walk all over the peace movement and discount it. There is an enormous amount of destruction that we aren't really hearing about. You have to go to the press outside the US because the major media in my view are acting like the PR arm of the government." Governments should recognize the value of a loyal opposition. "But that's not what we have. We have a government that is riding roughshod over anyone that doesn't agree with them."
The film will emphasize the enormous creativity of the anti war movement that came forward to protest the war on Iraq, set against pearls of wisdom from past presidents, and including interviews with people taking the risk to participate in actions of dissent. She did an interview with Warren Langley, the past head of the Pacific Stock Exchange. He was so disturbed about the war that he chose to blockade the Pacific Stock Exchange and was arrested. Recently she did an interview with Daniel Ellsberg, the man whose release of the Pentagon Papers revealed the deceits of the Vietnam War.
"By presenting a broad discussion on the state of our democracy, Americans will come to understand what is at stake and ponder the state and the safety of our most fundamental freedoms," Karil writes in her film proposal. "This is vital, because if we do not protect our freedoms now, before they are further eroded, we could lose them. By exploring and informing Americans of the changing political landscape and the dangerous risks to democracy, we will motivate greater participation in the political process through voting and activism."
"The Church of My Own Heart"
Karil is taking on a lot, positioning herself with her video camera right between the teeth of the dragon, as we all are, those of us who have chosen to speak out about what our government is doing.
So what feeds her soul?
In typically complete sentences, she answers, "I've always had a very internal non-easily categorized view of the bigger picture. When people who are bold enough to ask me what kind of feelings I have about religion, I say I am a member of the Church of My Own Heart.
I have a lot of understandings that are very personal about how the universe seems to be working based upon what I have observed. I'm very sensitive to the fact that established religions of all kinds, all of which I have rejected, are male instigated and male dominated. They don't speak to me. What speaks to me is a god that has no gender and I don't find that in anything except maybe pantheism. I feel connected to balance, to nature, connected to a reverence for source. And there aren't really better words than that.
I say goddess because when I think of source there's a birth there somewhere. If you believe that this somehow is not all an illusion, that we're all really here, we had to have gotten here, so there's source and there's the birth of something that is the universe. And if that's the case then it's more female than anything else. So I'm more comfortable with the word goddess than with the word god.
In the absolute bottom line, no one knows. For me to be anything other than an agnostic until I die makes no sense to me. I don't know and I accept that I don't really know. I can sense what I think but I don't know for sure and so I'm comfortable with that, I'm ok with that, I don't need to have some doctrine that will remove my intelligence, remove my analytical ability and replace this with a set of principles that were written by men. And in every religion that I'm aware of, they all devalue women on some level.
Then how does she feel about women's spirituality? "Oh, I love that. It feels right. It resonates with me.
"If there's any deity, it's female."
Visit Karil's website at where you will find an impressive list of all her films. If you want to learn about waterbirth, please go to All About Waterbirth and Water Babies, at http://www.waterbirthinfo.com
If you're interested in making a contribution to her new movie, Voices of Dissent, or in volunteering to help on the production, you may contact karil at karil@karildaniels.com.