What gives us purpose and meaning?

Bandersnatch Pictures can’t provide all the answers to your existential dilemmas, but personally, I (Julie!) do think the WHY of it all is certainly a question worth asking to ourselves every once in a while. I believe the sharing of stories to be one of humanity’s most essential acts. Through them we learn to listen, empathize, experience other cultures, understand complicated ideas. We tell stories to keep sane, even as a way to define ourselves.

Writer/artist Douglas Coupland talks about this idea a lot: that people seem to have a need for our lives to be a story. That when the world throws us too much information, we look for patterns to survive. Life begins with birth, ends with death, but the story part happens somewhere in the middle. Is there a reason we’re here, or are we just insects? “Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, [we as the authors] create places where previously invisible truths become visible.” Coupland also proclaimed in his novel Generation A, that “without stories, our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness.”

My favourite form of storytelling, of puzzling out the human condition… is through film. I love a good book, music, visual art. I love the high stakes of team sports, too. But nothing tops the cinema. It is the medium that so beautifully mashes elements of all these art forms together. I love how, over only a couple hours, a great film can lay down the dots for us to connect and somehow make some sense of our nonsensical lives. Then, take the collaborative craft of filmmaking itself. Another merger that combines the technical/scientific with the creative/artistic sides of our brains. You’ve likely heard that before - the whole Left Brain/Right Brain theory. Like the Yin and Yang. Lennon and McCartney. Bert and Ernie. Mulder and Scully. Peanut butter and jelly. It’s a cosmic recipe of discordant forces that compliment instead of clash. Somehow it just works. Of course, there’s so much more to life than movies. But it’s the most exquisite art form through which I prefer to explore it.