What we hope for: the healing touch of word, sound and image
The short film November Rose is a collaborative project of consolation and our gift to you. We wish to reach out to those who have lost a loved one and offer what we can as creative human beings: the healing touch of word, sound and image. We hope this will bring comfort, inspiration and healing in a time of loss, life and love.
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/ Meditation
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Kathrin Stengel (Author):
"What I have experienced is certainly not unique and something I share with many humans: losing my beloved, surviving the death of a loved one. This experience made it painfully clear to me that, as much as we all think about and probably fear our own death, most often death shows its face for the first time not at the end of our life but in the midst of it. The closer we were to our beloved, and hence to the epicenter of the beloved’s death, the more we feel the tremors. Our very being will be changed forever, our identity will have to be rebuilt. As a philosopher and author, I work with words in the hopes that these words might touch others, give voice to human experiences, allow them to be heard and shared in new ways. There is an invisible aura to words, there is a way that words can touch us in our hearts, and if anyone can bring this aura to light and touch our hearts through images, it is Thomas Riedelsheimer."
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Thomas Riedelsheimer (Film):
"In my career as a filmmaker and cameraman I have always struggled with words, and I still do. I love the unspoken poetry bespoken by images, which lets your mind wander and your emotions rise to the surface. Putting images and words together is like a delicate dance – the difficult balancing act of allowing both to breathe according to their very own respective rhythms. I hope that Kathrin and I have succeeded in providing for an experience that is profound and capacious enough for you to be able to appreciate and make the precious thoughts expressed in November Rose your own.
I shot the footage for this film over the past 15 years in various locations across the globe – Mexico, Canada, the US, Japan and Europe, among others. When on a film shoot or a vacation trip, I always tend to carry a small camera with me. The short scenes are inspired by a Japanese form of poetry called Haiku, which allows us to enjoy beauty and reflect on our own existence through momentary observations in nature."
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FRENCH
Christiane Guillois A professional translator for over thirty years, Christiane Guillois divides her time between Paris, France, and Maine. She has taught English language, literature, and civilization at the Université de Caen, as well as French language and civilization at Colby College. |
CHINESE
Chen Du Chen Du is a Voting Member of the American Translators Association and a member of the Translators Association of China. She holds MAs in Biophysics and Radio Physics from Roswell Park Cancer Institute, SUNY Buffalo, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, respectively, and is the author of Successful Personal Statements. In the United States, her translations, poems, and essays have appeared in more than thirty literary journals. Together with Xisheng Chen, she was long-listed by the 2021 John Dryden Translation Award for Yan An’s The World’s Ten Portraits. A set of five poems written by Yan An and co-translated with Xisheng Chen won the 2021 Zach Doss Friends in Letters Memorial Fellowship. Yan An’s poetry collection A Naturalist’s Manor, which Chen Du also co-translated with Xisheng Chen was published by Chax Press. Contact her at [email protected]. |
CHINESE
Xisheng Chen Xisheng Chen, a Chinese American, is an ESL grammarian, lexicologist, linguist, translator and educator. He holds an MA from Fudan University, Shanghai, and a Mandarin Healthcare Interpreter Certificate from the City College of San Francisco. His professional credits include: translator for Shanghai TV’s Evening English News; Lecturer at Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China; Adjunct Professor in the Departments of English and Social Sciences of Trine University (formerly Tri-State University), Angola, Indiana; notary public; and contract high-tech translator for Futurewei Technologies, Inc. in Santa Clara, California. Over the last three decades, his many translations in various fields have appeared in newspapers and journals in China and abroad. |