Join us for the Santa Cruz premiere of SAND’s SILA, followed by a Q&A with directors Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo. This is a rare opportunity to experience the film in community, on a big screen and share a conversation with the film directors. Doors open at 6 PM. Film begins at 6:30 PM.
For 50 years, the Resource Center for Nonviolence (RCNV) has equipped our community with tools to build a just and peaceful world. We’re proud to collaborate with Science and Nonduality (SAND)—an organization exploring our interconnectedness and humanity’s place within the web of life—to host the Santa Cruz Premieres of the Wisdom of the Ancestors film series. These films hold transformative power, and we believe viewing and contemplating them together can help disrupt cycles of violence and nurture Beloved Community.
Everyone is welcome. Complimentary tickets are available to ensure no one is turned away for lack of funds. Click here to secure your complimentary ticket.
Ticket sales support both RCNV and SAND’s vital work, and 50% of proceeds after film production costs directly fund Indigenous-led initiatives in the featured communities.
About the film:
SILA—The life within everything
In Greenland, the word Sila holds everything at once — the weather, the breath, the consciousness connecting all living things. This tender, nonlinear documentary follows Inuit women moving through three hundred years of Danish colonialism: forced baptisms, children sent abroad to be remade, and a systematic medical programme that inserted contraceptive devices into girls as young as thirteen, without consent, without warning, without asking. Their bodies became a site of colonial administration. Their wombs, silenced.
The film journeys into ceremony — the shaman’s call home, the heartbeat of the drum, the slow needle-drawn return of ancestral body markings erased within a century of missionary arrival. Visually luminous and spiritually attuned, Sila holds grief and remembering in the same breath: a remembering that travels through bone and nerve and the long line of mothers, all the way back to the first conscious human being. Still there. Still listening.
Listen to Drumdancing by Varna Marianne Nielsen from the film.
Content Advisory & Our Commitment to Care:
The films in this series honor the profound resilience of Indigenous cultures while addressing the brutal legacies of colonization. They may include references to physical and sexual violence, substance abuse, and intergenerational trauma. We acknowledge that this content can be deeply impactful, especially for those with lived or inherited experiences of such trauma.
To foster a respectful environment for all attendees, we will share clear Community Agreements at each screening. These include guidelines on privacy, consent, respectful sharing, and the right to exit and re-enter the space as needed. Our goal is to create a container where learning and reflection can happen with care for everyone’s well-being.
Special thanks to our promotional partners:
Center for Spiritual Living, Center for World Networking, Romero Institute, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH), SURJ Showing Up for Racial Justice—Santa Cruz County, and UCSC American Indian Resource Center