A Thousand Ways To Kiss The Ground

A Thousand Ways To Kiss The Ground is an exploration into grief and its expression through the stories of individuals who have experienced loss or trauma due to climbing or alpinism. Made in collaboration with the Climbing Grief Fund, this artful compilation of interviews highlights how there is no singular or correct way to grieve. Indeed this topic is complex, vulnerable, confusing, non-linear, and absolutely imperative to the health of all of our communities. The process of openly grieving, both alone as well as in community, is an art nearly lost in our culture. In A Thousand Ways To Kiss The Ground, climbers discuss how they are learning to integrate grief into their daily lives and in effect, change the community’s collective narrative surrounding this topic. A Thousand Ways To Kiss The Ground investigates the paradoxes of grief and the grieving process while mirroring this complexity back to viewers as a starting point to destigmatize and normalize the conversation surrounding grief for climbers and non-climbers alike.

“Let the beauty we love, be what we do. 
There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again.” -13th Century Poet Rumi

Director Biography

Self taught, over-worked, and under-paid, Henna Taylor continues to make documentaries. Continually evolving her capacity for story telling in each project. She began making films in 2011 and has somehow survived the initial growing pains of making this type of art only to have realized that growth in this field of communication is persistent in it’s ever-layered capacity for discomfort. What keeps her engaged in her work as a filmmaker are the illusive, most subtle moments of life. The things that cannot be spoken using words or seen solely with the eye. This, it may go without saying given the nature of her medium, presents interesting challenges for Henna. But thank goodness for these challenges because they are what defend her against the obvious, and the utterly repetitive nature of what is already known.

Credits

Director/Writer/Producer – Henna Taylor
Producer – Steve Sorkin
Producer – CMadaleine Sorkin

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