One of our passions in life is yoga and how it has the power to transform your life. James and I both teach yoga in Blenheim and actually met at an Ashtanga yoga intensive 16 years ago. During our time back in the US, we had the privilege of meeting Ebay Williams, a generational Crip gang member who had been in prison for half of his youth. Ebay had started practicing yoga, thanks to our good friend Hala Khouri, yoga teacher and somatic therapist who happened to live on his block where he was dealing. After being introduced to him, James decided to hire him as a PA on some of our productions and we got a glimpse of what it was like to be born into a gang and the powerful forces that keep people there.
Ebay was different. He admits he started yoga ‘because of the women’, but it was the practice and the breath that stayed with him and became the tools he needed to get another perspective in life. Ebay was arrested again, and began to practice inside, to the curiosity of the other prisoners. Fellow prisoners started to look out for him and would stand watch for him, surrounding him in a ring facing outwards, so he could practice without being a target in the yard. A white prisoner came up to him in the canteen and asked what he was doing and shared he also did yoga. In the brutal dog-eat-dog prison culture, yoga can be a rare unifying force that transcends race and circumstance.
James and Paul S. Eckstein, Hala’s husband, decided to shoot an interview with him and the resulting footage became our short doco ‘The Crip Who Loves Yoga’ which premiered at the Harlem International Film Festival and won ‘Best Short Doco’ at the Auckland International Film Festival this year. We got funded to shoot this short into a feature length documentary and James returned back to the US for 30 days with Stu to shoot Ebay’s follow-up story as well as organizations and individuals fighting the good fight with yoga.
What we got as well as Ebay’s follow-up were interviews with remarkable individuals: a 99 year old yoga teacher who marched with Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, still traveling and teaching, a female ex-paratrooper who had been on the front line of war, teaching yoga to vets and writing yoga programs for the US Army, among many others.
A recurring theme came through in the interviews was that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Social programs have been relentlessly cut in the US as the frequency and cost of incarceration has soared. With these documentaries, one focusing on Ebay and yoga in prison and the other showing the more macro view of the power of yoga in other populations, we hope to bring this to more people’s attention. We’ll be launching a crowd-funding campaign in early 2018 to raise money to finish the docos and push them out there into the world.
Fighting the good fight.
Stay tuned!