Pierre Heistein

Pierre Heistein talks to Brendan Davis, from episode 58, about the documentary film he made telling the story of Atuel River in Mendoza region, Argentina.

In 2020 there were protests against the overturning of a water protection law that had successfully kept water-intensive mining projects out of the Mendoza province, the largest wine-producing region in Latin America that gets water from the Atuel River.

Pierre and two others decided to trace the route of the river from high up in the Andes to its end in the Cuyo Desert, becoming the first to do so, and recording perspectives of local people who engage with the river in different ways. The resulting documentary received an overwhelmingly positive response from the local community and has caused Pierre to reflect on society’s pace of life, reliance on, and connectedness to nature.

Pierre believes that we really are capable of creating more harmonious relationships with each other and the natural world that supports us. He contributes to this through photography, entrepreneurship, teaching, and fatherhood.

Find out more at: ATUEL Documentary Spanish version and Instagram 

Email:  Pierre DOT Heistein @ Gmail.com

Connect with Brendan Davis https://www.crazyinagoodway.com

Key Quotes from Pierre Heistein

• We felt that it was very important to make the river the main subject, the protagonist of this film.
• We were forced to move at the river’s pace and we were forced to move at the pace of nature itself.
• It made me reflect on how to work better, how to live better, how to produce better and to do so at a far more natural pace of ebb and flow of passion and rest. 
• I think the river just taught me that just how to ebb and flow, how to speed up, slow down, go stop and really integrate that into the rest of my life
• We are a manmade oasis in the middle of the desert, it is impossible to live here without having a deep connection to the river.
• The feedback we got afterwards was people said ‘I saw my society fill the screen’.
• Here in Mendoza of the entire province only 3% is used by humans, and you might say we’ve got 97% of it still left to use, but we can’t because there’s no water and there’s not enough water to expand.
• Our little planet earth in this immense of expansive space is the only place we can live. And we depend on it. And if we don’t look after it, we’re probably not gonna be able to live here, at least with not any level of quality of life.
• It has made me really question, what am I working towards and reminded me to, to just always be very conscious of the jobs I seek and understand why.
• We are not here to serve nature. Nature’s not here to serve us. It’s a relationship. and just like any relationship in our lives, it needs to be as healthy as possible.

Brendan Davis – Host

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Pierre Heistein Transcription

[00:00:00] Sue: Welcome to the podcast, Pierre and Brendan. It’s great to speak to both of you today.

[00:00:06] Brendan: Same. Likewise.

[00:00:07] Pierre: I’m excited. I love this podcast. This is great.

[00:00:12] Sue: Well, I’m going to hand over the reins of hosting today to Brendan. He was our guest on episode 58 of the podcast. And I know he’ll do a great job today and it’s over to you.

[00:00:24] Brendan: Well, thank you very much. No pressure, but yeah, I’m looking forward to this and for the audience, little backstory is that Sue knows Pierre and introduced us by email and just thought, oh, you guys among the things you do, you both do documentary film. And I think I have a feeling that you guys would enjoy talking to each other. And we have had a nice back and forth on email for some time, but this is our very first time actually talking and the audience can’t see that we’re on video chat as well. So Pierre it’s really nice to meet you here.

[00:00:54] Pierre: Likewise, I’ve been looking forward to this. So what a great way to meet someone and keep it candid, keep it sharp, and really looking forward to the discussion today.

[00:01:03] Brendan: Well, let’s start with just a little bit of who are you in your own words? You have a fascinating story but what’s the short capsule version of, your superhero origin story, and then we’ll zoom to the present day and talk about your current awesome achievement.

[00:01:16] Pierre: My background, if you will, I grew up in South Africa. I’m busy speaking to you from Argentina. And so I, grew up, studied there, loved South Africa. And then just after my studies decided that I wanted to travel really wanted to learn Spanish, always being fascinated by the language and the culture, especially the south American part of it. And so I brought myself over here actually two days before my 25th birthday thinking that I would travel a couple of months, maybe a year or two at most.

And here I am 11 years later, still living in a place called San Rafael, which is in the middle of the Cuyo desert in Argentina, just south of Mendoza city in the province of Mendoza. My professional background, if you will, I studied economics. worked in that for a bit. Well still, still do in many senses. Did a masters project on the sustainable fishing industry in South Africa or trying to make it sustainable, which was fascinating. And throughout all my work I think there’s always been a very strong thread of environmental curiosity, consciousness, desire for learning in that space.

And then through my work, I did did a bit of consulting work but took huge amounts of time off, which I was very grateful. I had a sort of format of job that could do that and traveled quite a bit. Started a documentary filmmaking company, as you’ve alluded to started another, a small startup that was focused on really combating gender based violence specifically, but with an a larger view towards. Trying to identify all the barriers to gender equality and seeing how you could confront that from a social business point of view. And, that’s what I’m juggling. Now. I dunno. These are hard questions.  I’d appreciate if you dove in and we can chat some more.

[00:03:02] Brendan: Oh, I throw you a lifeline. I’m glad to. Well, you did better with that question than I typically, I, as much, as many times as I’ve been asked, something like that, it’s always like, okay, how do I keep this short? So several things that I, that I want to touch on and then really drill into where we are today, because among primary topic points while we met were that you have this documentary film you’ve recently completed Atuel about the river running through Argentina and especially through Mendoza and starts in the Andes mountains, as I understand. And so the film as I’ve come to learn from watching and appreciating it strikes me very much it’s not just a documentary. I mean, it’s one part philosophical art film. There seems to be more of like more of a spiritual call to action toward consciousness, it’s not simply mechanistic of, you know, this bad thing happened and now here’s how we change it. Cuz really the premise of the film is this is an inevitable result of man’s relationship to earth and nature and, and it poses a lot of questions and they don’t all have easy answers or they don’t have answers. You could do anything about. So that’s my long-winded way to give you the fertile playground in which to address your thoughts about it. Cause  I’m curious what you’re thinking was when you went into this film and then how it evolved as you, came to the conclusion of the filmmaking process.

[00:04:27] Pierre: That’s fascinating feedback and perspective on the film, because I think one of the reasons I was so excited about Sue introducing us was I saw in your experience in exposure, the opportunity to ask you Brendan, what have we made because it wasn’t initially clear afterwards, and that was largely thanks to the process. We didn’t go in with a desire to necessarily define a certain message or film and build the story towards that message. And that came from both the unknown. So the premise was that the Atuel river here in Mendoza, it starts at about three and a half, 4,000 meters, right on the border of Chile high up in the Andes, and then flows out into the Cuyo desert and doesn’t reach the sea.

It dries out depending on the season, after about 550 kilometers, for various reasons which are shown in the film, but it was just this fascinating concept of a river ending prematurely. And so the idea was to get onto that river and it was largely sparked by huge protests here against a law that could allow for potentially contaminating processes and specifically mining along the river bed. And we have absolute dependence on the river. We, live in a desert oasis and so that was the spark. So it really came from a question of here we are trying to defend this river, trying to, to stand up for the river, but do we actually know the river?

And can we truly, against adversity, defend something that we don’t know. And so that was the premise we said, right. Let’s then get to know this river. And the only way to do that is travel the whole river. So we started if the first challenge was to find the source of the river, as you see in the film and then travel down its entire length, but getting to your question.

We didn’t know what we were going to find, but the other element of that is that we felt that it was very important to make the river, the main personality, the main subject, the protagonist of this film, and to do that truly, we had to ask the river, well, what story do you want to tell? And so when we got in our boats and allowed it to float us down, cause we, we were little blow up pack craft.

I mean, you can’t really paddle forward. You float and steer. And so we were very much traveling at the river’s pace and asked the river. What stories do you want to tell us? What is your story? And so once we sat on what ended up being about 12 hours of footage and interviews from all different perspectives, we had to look at that and go now, what is the story that the river has told us?

And how do we honor that? How do we edit to that? How do we stitch that together? And so over two year process of back and forth and, and building the film. We saw it. We understood it. We connected to it, but we had this immensely intimate connection to both the river and the film because of the process, but looking at it from the outside, we had no idea what we had made.

 We didn’t know. And I’m not sure if that answers your question, but it wasn’t a specific here we want to tell this. And, and I think that was both very difficult from a filmmaking point of view, but also the magical part of really being mediums for the message of others through the art of film.

[00:07:37] Brendan: Well, I’m glad to see my suspicion instinct impulse born out from what you say, because that really was my primary feeling as I was, approximately through the first third or so of the film. And it was sort of coming together and I saw the shape of how it was going to develop.

And, I guess probably all of us, like everyone has a range of what they like and I like and have made documentary projects or been involved with everything from more, philosophical think piece art film, where there is clearly no agenda stated at the beginning of the process.

You’re not trying to solve for X. I know, from your economics background, it’s like, you’re not trying to arrive at a specific result. Your only destination was to get to the end of the river. Like quite literally, but it, but you didn’t have some preconceived. Here’s the flag we’re planting when we arrive, in terms of here’s our message.

And of course there are the things where just to use an easy example, like a Michael Moore pretty much. I mean, he has something in mind. He tells you what he’s expecting to find and tell you, and then he tells you, and then he tells you what he told you. So it’s a little more of like a Ted talk.

That’s very structured and from the beginning. And so I appreciated that it was, a visceral journey of discovery something that struck me about it. And it’s funny. That, I mean, when we got onto this again, the audience just hears us, but we have a video component here so we can all see each other. I didn’t recognize you because there, are backs of heads and some profiles. It’s very consciously the humans you’re in the environment, but you’re clearly in the river’s perspective. Like, I couldn’t have picked you or your wife or other traveling companions. I couldn’t have picked you out of a lineup from watching your film for an hour and 15 minutes. So I thought that was very effective, how you were in the POV of the river and of the environment that clearly the intention and clearly well delivered on.

[00:09:35] Brendan: So I guess I’m saying congrats. You can take a victory lap and I’ll think of a next question.

[00:09:39] Pierre: that’s brilliant. I appreciate hearing that because it’s hard, right? I mean, as you say, it’s, it’s a beautiful challenge and, to develop that art piece side of it and allow it to flow and allow it to go where it goes, but there as humans, as audience. Story lovers. There are also certain archetypes.

I mean, you know, this better than anyone that work and others that drag on too long. And so there are these kind of, if you will, pillars of filmmaking that you also need to respect if you really want to evoke emotion and attachment. And that’s the idea, if you want to get to know the river, you need to feel emotionally driven to watch this film and finish the film and enjoy the film..

And so there were certain things that we needed to include. And one of those was this challenge of personalities, you know, who are the characters in this room? So as you saw, we used a lot of interviews and some really interesting characters amongst those, but they come and go and, and very few times, do you feel that you’ve perhaps grown or gotten to know one of them?

And then in terms of our journey as well, it was this, how do you balance it? What we really, really didn’t want to make was the kind of typical. Well, here I am traveling a river, but the story’s about me and how much we argue at night because we’re tired and hungry and cold and fed up.

[00:10:49] Brendan: You had to be fairly physically miserable and yeah, the journey would’ve between the mosquitoes and yeah, I’m sure it was one of the least comfortable experiences that you could have on purpose with the camera

[00:11:00] Pierre: physically, perhaps. But yeah, we didn’t want to make it a big brother on the river kind of show. But at the same time, we,

[00:11:06] Brendan: Right,

[00:11:07] Pierre: we, we did want, you know, we needed to vote a human bridge to that. And so it’s, I’m glad to hear that those back shots, those continuous links did work in some way or form.

[00:11:18] Brendan: yeah. Yeah. That was, I thought that was really well done

[00:11:21] Sue: maybe I’ve got a question thinking about the idea that this podcast about inspiration and I’m wondering what inspired you along on the journey?

[00:11:33] Pierre: Oh, I think this film for me was it’s still playing out. Right. It’s still like, I feel like it’s still the bread in the oven. I’m not quite sure how it’s gonna all play out, but it turned things inside of me on their head. Is funny. It wasn’t even the act of filmmaking, but something really powerful that happened to me on the film was what I alluded to earlier about moving at the river’s pace.

And sometimes that was extremely fast and nearly killed us. And other times that was very, very slow, but we were forced to move at the river’s pace and we were forced to move at the pace of nature itself, which. In many ways, shuts down every night, the sunsets nature calms a lot of things go to bed and they stop producing.

Now, there are others that obviously do that at night, but we were forced in this production to start work at a certain time and end work at a certain time. We couldn’t control that the river. And nature controlled that now in our overly digitized world, our remote working our freelance projects are goal based outcome based attitude towards life and work.

It becomes easier and easier. And I have fallen deeply trapped into this, of just working all the time, just producing all the time and, and even when I’m not, or even when I’m choosing to. I could be producing. And so you have to fight off this guilt of not doing so. And so for the river, for me to spend over a month working at the pace of nature for me was, was I, I don’t want to fall into hyperbole, but I dare say life changing because it made me reflect on. Just how to work better, how to live better, how to produce better and to do so at a far more natural pace of ebb and flow of passion and rest I mean the old adage of, you know, if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life is absolute non. Because it’s still work. Doesn’t matter how passionate you are.

It’s still work. It’s still stressful. It’s still tiring. It’s still demanding. It’s beautiful, but you need to rest. And I think the river just taught me that just how to ebb and flow, how to speed up, slow down, go stop and really integrate that into the rest of my life. And I’m looking forward to seeing how that plays out.

[00:13:45] Brendan: Well, that’s a wonderful response that actually is in, in line with some of the things that I plan to ask. And it’s, it’s a nice setup for that. I do want to, probably later in our talk to discuss the overscale reaction to this, since overscale, since you weren’t trying to solve for X going in, it was a process of discovery clearly.

And the film has, you’ve been really having a fantastic response and reception to this, but I, I wanna first talk about something else. I just wanna plant that seed to acknowledge thats lead the groundwork for that. Because I think that’s really going to bring home the inspirational theme of this, but let’s talk a little filmmaking nerdy mechanics for a second.

How again, so just for the sake of audience who hasn’t seen it yet and then you should see it of course as soon as you can. It’s a merry band of adventures with these small inflatable boats that are essentially like a canoe kayak. And there’s a lot of hiking and walking as well because there’s simply places where the river isn’t is not possible or has petered out for some reason.

And you have to, it’s quite a slog. And sometimes there are seem, you know, helmet cam, but there are also a lot of their drone shots where you have cameras way up in the air. The filmmaking production quality is more than I would expect from what looks like. It looks like three of you in, in two craft and a couple of tents is that, was that the size of the team and how did you make it? How did you capture this?

[00:15:12] Pierre: That’s exactly right. Well and well perceived. So the, the higher part of the river, which. Very high in the Andean mountain range. It’s a dangerous situation because if something goes wrong, you are many hours. If not a full day from any help for that. And we actually did have quite a, quite a nasty accident with one of the sons of the guides.

He got tossed off his horse, landed on the metal framing on the donkeys that we’re carrying the bags and actually tore. A considerable size of his calf. And so his dad strapped him over his horse and they just bolted back down it, but it took them over 24 hours to get to hospital. And luckily he’s fine was saved.

But that section was the only section where we had a support vehicle. So there were actually four of us on the trip, three in the boats and one in the vehicle. Yeah, there was an extra need for support, unless you were really going to invest in quite large, expensive infrastructure to do that. And, and that, wasn’t the point of the film. Again, we were there to, to portray the river.

[00:16:13] Brendan: Let’s hire a private jet to follow us about our, why we’re doing our environmentally

[00:16:17] Pierre: yeah. Also.

[00:16:18] Brendan: let’s let’s let’s let’s have a 10,000 X, carbon footprint relative to what we’re trying to preach.

[00:16:23] Pierre: very good point. So with the exception of that, you’re absolutely right. It was three of us did little blow up boats. We had to stop every now and then just to charge batteries from a practical point of view or ask for support, ask to bring in new supplies. But essentially we did, we traveled the full river us with our cameras and the three of us were the cameramen.

It was mostly me on the drone and the underwater shots and the shots from the boat. And then my partner in crime, Ben with black magic cinema. Cinematographic can never say that word camera. That also just brings out that beautiful texture. You see some from some of the still shots now from, was that we, we couldn’t get that out on the boats because it was just two days.

There’s one shot. Going under the train bridge where we put the camera on the boat and filmed that, we risked it for one shot and one shot only the rest was actually filmed off off the phone, the river shots. And then the helmet cam you speak about in the rapids was a beautiful coincidence where actually the fourth person I referred to decided just to bring along, he laughs he calls it as go poor because it’s not a GoPro. It’s. A much cheaper rip off, but because of the action packed nature of that, the quality doesn’t interrupt the film. So yeah, in total four cameras and all of us just trying to manage that and, and be very, very disciplined about the shooting battery use. That in itself was its own challenge, but a welcome one, because the first document we made, we filmed 55 hours of footage to make an hour’s film, which was just ridiculous. Right? I mean, you need to pull things back a little.

[00:17:56] Brendan: Yeah. It’s its own story, but a documentary that I inherited ended up being a co-writer and producer. And, I cut it. So basically a hour and a half long documentary and it had, I think 220 hours of footage by the time he was done shooting by the time the crazy direct. Yeah, it was five years. It was a five year project. So yes, let’s not do that again. He said so, so getting back towards the inspiration part of this and, and again, filmmakers. Would again, will watch this and appreciate, oh yeah. They, they really grab shots every way they could, but again, obviously it’s not all just, just a phone or just a GoPro. I mean, you have a lot of, a lot of really portraiture shots. A lot of nice Tableau stuff, you know, it looks like you’re on sticks, tripod for the civilians. You’re on sticks with a lot of establishing shots and or else you have a drone that’s in really wonderful hover mode that you’re using.

So you know, it’s very watchable. It’s imminently watchable as a piece of work. It doesn’t look like something that you just did with like a GoPro, which those, those are difficult to watch. In terms of the reaction to this. Could you talk to us a little bit about. The reception, because I know the answer to this a little bit, but I’d like to hear you, you share some details of how the film has been received locally, and that will lead into my follow up.

So I’ll tell you now, and this way you can put it all together. If you like is what are. Going in, you we’ve established that you didn’t have a fixed plan in terms of, you know very specifically what you wanted to do with it other than to document it and show and relate an experience to it. So tell us about this overscale reaction. And then how has this adjusted your thinking about where you go from here in your career? You know, cause I would imagine I don’t wanna plant too many seeds in your soil of your mind, but I, but I would imagine that you were already thinking bigger and better. And, you know, I imagine this has expanded your thinking a bit. So let me shut up and let you tell me.

[00:20:05] Pierre: Absolutely. Well, I’m gonna throw a question back to you later on or fair, but it’s all very well to expand your thinking and see the destination, but then the complicated part is building a bridge to that. So that’s the part I’m struggling with now. But to your question specifically, maybe I could sit it up at asking the audience almost to imagine, imagine something, a place, a setting, a. Entity around them, whether natural or not, I mean, how it could be your shopping mall. It doesn’t matter, but something that really defined their upbringing, something that really defined the culture of where they live, something that, the whole place comes together around and, and defines the identity of who you are.

And as a person and as a culture, essentially what we formed by filming the river was that, that this river is everything to where we live. People have very much different entry points to it. It could be, they love going fishing on the lake, or they love kayaking down the rapids, or they own a tourism company, or they’re a farmer and the river gets split off and irrigated onto their farm.

I mean, there, there there’re many, many different entry points to what your relationship with the river is. But essentially we are a manmade oasis in the middle of the desert. It is impossible to live here without having a deep deep connection to the river, whether you love it or not, whether you’re an environmentalist or not, it doesn’t matter.

And so locally, what we did is we told the story about the thing that links everyone here together, and we reflected that back to society and our goal for the documentary. Going back to little bit was very much, we are not gonna come here and impose on what your relationship with the river should be.

What we want to do is deepen your relationship with the river. So you may know a kilometer or two of the river. You may know 10 kilometers of the river. Nobody knows all 500 kilometers of it, where we are the first people to ever travel the full length of the river by boat. And to then put that on film,

we are introducing you to the entirety of something you’ve known all your life. It’s a bit like when you make a really good friend in your university days. As close as you can get to them, you weren’t there for their childhood. You, you never saw their nascent period of their lives.

And that many ways is what happens here. This, the city is down river. Very few people have seen the up river element. It’s just like that. It’s like watching a film of the childhood of your best friend. And so the reaction locally was phenomenal. I mean, people were. Blown away. And they also didn’t expect the quality, the quality of imaging, the quality of editing, the quality of music, which was all, but one song was bespoke and written for us.

A lot of people and, and, and there’s also a representation of, Hey, this is us, where we’re a small desert town in the middle of nowhere, and often quite insecure about that. And here we have this film showing us and it is of competitive international at least technical quality and, and so a lot of pride and what was really most mind blowing for me on a local level.

I mean, we had. A premier night at the local convention center, unfortunately there’s not a really, really good cinema we could have used here. So put up a big screen at the convention center and put out 380 chairs. And we were about 150 chairs short. There was no space left in the room. People were in the aisles, people were standing all along the walls and that created something I had never expected.

And all this feedback we got afterwards was people said, I walked into that. I saw my society fill the screen. Now keep in mind it was zero degrees. The convention center’s a little bit out of town. It started at eight o’clock people here are notorious for just not doing things. And if they do them doing them late at eight o’clock, that whole place was packed and people walked in there.

And the comments we got back was I am proud to live here.. I am proud to be part of the society. If that many people are gonna come out in the cold to watch something about their river. And that for us was, was never expected. I mean, we never even thought of that. Never dreamed of that impact. So that was, that was really special.

And then into your question about the international impact? Well, this is, this is the open book, right? This is what I’m still unsure of and desperate for feedback to see how it resonates with, with people. But we have had some wonderful feedback so far, and I think what ties it all together is that a river in a desert is a beautiful analogy for our planet in space because here in Mendoza of the entire province, only 3%. Is used by humans, let’s say habited. Whether that be industry agriculture, residential, all put together, we only use 3% of the province. Now you could say, oh, well that means you’ve got 97% of it’s still left to use, but we can’t because there’s no water and there’s not enough water to expand.

And it’s just like our dear planet earth. By all means I I’m a huge supporter of. Scientific curiosity and expeditions to Mars and the idea of maybe a couple of people living there. That’s great, but we’re certainly not all gonna move there. And if we do the quality of life is gonna be abysmal.

And so our little planet earth in this immense of expansive space is the only place we can live. And we depend on it. And if we don’t look after it, we’re probably not gonna be able to live here at least with not any level of quality of life. And I think that message where or where that connection’s made and where other people, regardless of where you are. I mean, forest fires in California fires in, in, in Europe, floods, people are starting to look around them and go, I am deeply dependent on my natural environment. And I think that’s what the film communicates and people are starting to see themselves in the film going, Hey, this is me.

I mean, yes, it’s a random middle town in Argentina, but it’s also me. And I think where that hits home People are quite moved by the film. Quite a few people said they’ve cried. I’d love to get inside their heads and know why, but that’s an ongoing process. And I think that it’s kind of like, we, we we’ve unleashed it and, you know, the verb of showing a film is to project a film.

And that’s exactly it, you project outwards and there’s so few channels to then receive feedback from that. So I’m dying to know, you know, what, what is going on with people when they watch the film. So if you have any feedback on that, I’d love to know of . If you have any ideas,

[00:26:11] Brendan: Well, we could probably connect offline and, and ramble a bit more because it’s dangerous for me to, to get into too much of what I think. Here for the sake of time, but I, it, as you’re, as you’re talking about this and it just resonating in, in terms of, possible impact with with getting it exposed to like a festival audience and because of the length, you know, probably doing like a, like a slight trim to make it fit into an hour for a TV sales, I mean, that seems like a real path for it. So that maybe where people end up watching it is watching it on the discovery channel or something. If they don’t see it at like a film festival and see the longer version, or of course you could just put it online somewhere, but It’s interesting that earlier this week I happened to notice, speaking of, Atuel and the issues with water.

And I saw something earlier this week about the Loire river and France is drying up. And then earlier today before we got on the call, when I just happened to be checking all my messages, I saw something that the Euphrates in Iraq is drying up. And so, there’s certainly a theme here in terms of our connection to the environment.

And I guess my last question, and then I should, we should let Sue land the plane here. But I guess my last question is, what has it done for you personally? How has this process shifted your thinking or. Towards all of this. And again, you have a family. And so you think about these things outside of just yourself, but how, how is, how has this process of this film changed yourself?

[00:27:50] Pierre: I think it is just put some fire back into me of constantly questioning. What I’m using my time for? And again, we shouldn’t fall into tropes of just follow your dreams and do what you love and be led by passion, because there was some realities that you need to balance that with.

And balance is important, but it has made me really question, what am I working towards and reminded me to, to just always be very conscious of. The jobs. I choose the jobs I seek and understand why. So at the moment I work in, in essentially a, an executive networking and, and skill building space for large companies. And it’s, it’s wonderful, I think it’s, this films made me just, it’s brought back my discipline of every day. Just making sure that I know why I’m doing what I’m doing. And so today’s answer for that is yes. I love my job. I, I really do. But why am I doing it? Because it’s amazing training for me personally.

 It’s essentially I am working, but I am learning and, and not just going along with it, so really questioning why am I learning that? What do I want to use that for? And, just really being very strict on that idea of. When do I change? And what is the real impact that I want to make? What is the real thing that I want to dedicate the time of my life to, and, and this film and this process has reminded me once again, that at my core, it’s, it’s that connection with the, the natural world.

And that, regardless of what form I do it in, I need to constantly either find or build the space where my skills can come together to contribute to a much healthier relationship between us as a human society and the natural world that surrounds us and really just deepen from a very practical point of view. That awareness that we are part of that system, completely reliant on it and we owe it also, there’s a wonderful line in the documentary that that says, will we look after the river as well, as well as it looks after us. And I, I think what what’s captured there is the relationship. It’s a relationship.

We are not here to serve nature. Nature’s not here to serve us. It’s that relationship and just like any relationship in our lives, it needs to be as healthy as possible. And, the processes really reminded me that that’s essentially what I would like to work on in, in one form or another.

[00:30:37] Sue: Wow. I think the word relationship is a fantastic note to end on their peer and in a way sums. How we got to this conversation in the first place, by our podcast, having a relationship and connecting with Brendan, who was a recommendation from another guest we’d had earlier, that then pays it forward to introduce you into the relationship.

And I hope our listeners to the relationship with your film and your documentary so they can get some of that inspiration that they’ve been listening to today in this conversation, if people do want to find out more

[00:31:13] Pierre: question’s being asked earlier. I feel the,

[00:31:16] Sue: might they be able to do that?

[00:31:18] Pierre: the simplest. So in terms of the film itself Our current platform for connection is, is our Instagram account. So that’s a 12 documental. So that’s A T U E L and then documentary and Spanish, essentially, T O C U M E N T a L.

So if you seek that on, on Instagram, we’re constantly uploading different photos and, and keeping that space alive. However you. You’re more than welcome just to reach out to me directly. I’d love those conversations. So my email is simply Pierre dot hasty, gmail.com. You’ll see that written in the description.

I suppose, my, my first name dot surname, gmail.com. And I’d love to open up those spaces. We will eventually we are working on a website to land this and things, but again, you going back to Brenda’s comment, where does this film. That’s always the hard part. We’ve got the Spanish version up on YouTube at the moment.

You can search for that. But we’ve kept the English translator or the subtitle version back until we make strategic distribution decisions on that. And just know if we’re not gonna be closing any doors by, by making that public for now, but that’s a whole different conversation, the distribution of projects and art and the necess. Commercial side of that is we could do a whole podcast series on that. I think. So that was a very long answer to very simple question.

[00:32:44] Sue: I only really serves for me to say a big thank you to U P for such interesting insights that you provided to us and Brendan, thank you so much for being our host today for providing the questions and the, the knowledge that enables you to get a much better sense from PR about the work that he’s produced.

And I hope

[00:33:05] Brendan: you, Sue. Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupted. Thank you. And thank you to Pierre

[00:33:08] Pierre: you both.

[00:33:08] Brendan: conversation. We

[00:33:09] Pierre: great Sue, you know that I admire you and I admire your podcast and, and Brendan has achieved many things that I am aspiring to. So it’s been an absolute honor to, to chat here. I appreciate the, the quality of the space, the quality of the connections, and always a pleasure to, to discuss what we love.

Sound Editor: Matias de Ezcurra (he/him)

Producer: Sue Stockdale (she/her)