Updates, Live: Ben Sutherland: Skylight Kunming

Michael John Sutherland (1966-2007)
image by Isaac Hernandez-Herrero
(http://www.independent.com/news/2007/dec/06/michael-john-sutherland-1966-2007/)
no copyright infringement intended

After watching the Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man of Ben Sutherland and Gonzague Pichelin, I looked for other movies made by these two authors. That's how I came to Skylight Kunming. This time Ben Sutherland was the main author, as director, screenwriter, and cinematographer, while his friend Gonzague Pichelin did the editing and released the movie through his own production oufit, Zag Zoo Films.

Actually the Portrait of a ... and Skylight Kunming are so far their only movies listed on IMDb. Ben is working on a new project (not yet titled). It is a documentary on the rise of private military companies for an emergent business: counter-piracy operations in the Red Sea and beyond.

I was fascinated by the Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man: it had a special rhythm that allowed the recreation on the screen of a whole universe, through a rapid transition of a huge number of persons - each one coming to give her or his testimony and leaving quickly to make place to the next one - each testimony being short, while percussive. It's the Parisian Shakespeare and Company: the movie pulls out from that bookstore a whole universe.

I recognized in Skylight Kunming the same qualities: a fantastic sense of the cinematic rhythm, allowing the rendering of the story through a rapid transition of quick and percussive testimonies. This time it is about a man whose personality is revealed as a whole universe. Director Ben Sutherland made Skylight Kunming in the memory of his brother Mike.

The biography of Mike Sutherland is amazing. To say only that he was an enthusiast of outdoor activities and green business, to say even that he had a a generous and adventurous way of life, would be a misnomer. It was much more. For him home was where his toothbrush was - and his toothbrush was constantly moving on.

During college years, he spent a semester in an intensive program where a small number of guys were living in log cabins like the first pioneers (or rather like solitary anchorites), while reading, discussing, and analyzing classic texts. Another semester was spent in a floating university (Semester at Sea, ran by the University of Pittsburgh): circling the globe, attending classes while at sea, exploring the countryside while in the harbors. Then he moved to Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, a liberal arts institution based on a student-directed curriculum. After majoring in Consciousness Studies, he started a solo bike tour of Asia: two years throughout Pakistan, India, Nepal and China.

Mike settled eventually in Kūnmíng, the capital of Yunnan, a province in the far southwest of China, bordering Burma, Laos, and Vietnam. Here he started promoting the off-roads biking (organizing bike clinics, rides, races, and tours) and soon made a lot of friends, who nicknamed him Bike-Mike (to make the distinction from Airplane-Mike, a guy earlier arrived at Kūnmíng, and working there for Boeing).

For me, all this calls in mind other two names. Firstly my brother-in-law Wolfi (Wolfgang Held), also an adventuresome spirit who spent a couple of years in his youth to wander through India, Australia, and also New Zealand, I think. He is a well-known documentary cinematographer whose contracts bring him everywhere on Earth, Romania and Mongolia, China and Germany, France and Italy, and all across US. He is a passionate kayaker and an enthusiast of guitar. This would be one name. Then, of course, Chris Doyle, who worked in Norway on an off-shore drilling platform, and in Israel as a shepherd, before settling to Hong Kong to become one of the greatest cinematographers nowadays.

Mike (or let's rather call him Bike-Mike, like his fellows were doing) worked in Kūnmíng as a free-lance reporter and photographer for COLORS, a quarterly magazine about the rest of the world. Also he discovered during his trips within Yunnan province the traditional hemp cultivation and became an enthusiast. He opened an echo-friendly business of hemp clothing (People's Hemp) that grew to become a full line with on-line catalog, US order fulfillment and international sales.

The life of Mike Sutherland ended abruptly in 2007. It was a whitewater rafting accident: Mike and six others had set out on Nanpanjiang River outside Kūnmíng. The group split: five on the raft, and two in a kayak. The kayak capsized, the raft came to rescue and overturned, too. Three people, including Mike and his girlfriend Li Limei, drowned.

Shortly after the accident Ben Sutherland and his other brothers came to Kūnmíng, to pay their respects to the memory of Mike. The making of the movie started those days: Ben wanted to discuss with all people who had known Mike, and shooting the film was also, for him and for them, a necessary therapy. It is an after the fact documentary. The image of Mike appears only once, by the end, very briefly, somehow in an iconic way - but he is all the time present in the movie, you feel him through the intensity of the testimonies about his life. The movie was not intended for distribution - it was just a way to make justice for the memory of Mike. It was, however, well received: it got the Indie Award of Merit and the Best Short Documentary Award the film won at the Washougal International Film Festival. Ben hopes it will be aired on Sundance.