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teach the poor gratuitously. That was the original spirit of the brotherhood, though that spirit is long since gone. There were all sorts of rational and "correct" reasons why the brothers were not able to teach the poor: it wasn't practical; if they
did
teach the poor, they couldn't sustain their life-styles. In fact, almost all the children in the schools where I taught were middle-class kids, and yet I lived in
this
community [Santa Fe] where about forty percent of the people had no access to primary medical care, and where the barrio was being eroded out from under the poor. There was great social disintegration. A lot of the people who were and are in the barrio come from the little villages in Northern New Mexico that were pushed out because of welfare laws. So there was a huge community of poverty, and I felt drawn to give some kind of assistance if I
could
.
When I started to work in the community, it became apparent that there were huge neighborhood-based gang structures, nine in number. I dedicated myself to dealing with that situation, and that got me in trouble with my order because they felt that I was acting in a singular, rather than a communal, way.
During the course of that activity, a friend turned me onto a film. I had not seen many films, to be truthful. I went into the brotherhood at the age of fourteen; we were told to shun the world, or were made to shun the world.
MacDonald:
Was it your choice to join the order?
Reggio:
Yes, it was. I had a desire to pursue an idealistic life. I think children, especially adolescents, pursue as much meaning as they have access to, and this looked like a very meaningful thing for me to do. I lived in a very stratified racist society, New Orleans, and I don't want to say I had lived la dolce vita, but I had lived a pretty fast life already by that time, and I wanted to leave it for something more meaningful. My family wasn't so happy about my choice, but they gave me the freedom to do what I wanted to do. So that meant being away from them from that time forward.
Anyway, during the course of my life in Santa Fe, my friend turned me onto this film by Luis Buñuel,
Los Olvidados
[1950]. It was shot in the barrios of Mexico City, though it could have been shot here. Santa Fe isn't a big city, but the barrios are similar. That film touched me deeply, and I used it as a tool to help organize the gangs into a super-family called Young Citizens for Action. I felt if
I
could be touched that deeply by this medium, it was worth exploring.
I don't make films like Buñuel's, but I decided then that if I could imagine the kind of films I wanted to make, I might be able to make themif I wouldn't get mystified by the tools.
The analysis that makes up the metaphysical base for the
Qatsi
Tril-