The Human Experience Is Humbling
Nothing speaks to how arrogant we are as the things that annoy or depress us. How many times do we speak or hear “This has been the worst day”? Or the more dramatic, “This has been the worst day of my life?" Since, by definition, each worst day must be worse than the last, by the time we’re in our thirties our lives must really be in the toilet. How can we face another day when it is potentially going to be exponentially worse than, say, the day the dog got run over? Okay….pity parties aren’t always bad things, but every once in a while we need something that puts everything in perspective.
The Human Experience, an independent documentary being released by Docuramafilms on DVD March 29, 2011, is just the right something. It reminds us that all those little things that add up to a big nothing but bother the heck out of us are all just little things. It chronicles the “adventures” of a group of altruistic young men—Clifford Azize, Jeffrey Azize, Michael Campo, and Matthew Sanchez—who investigate the meaning of life by “living among the world’s forgotten souls.” It follows them from their home in Brooklyn to the streets of New York where brothers Clifford and Jeffrey Azize (who narrate the film) live among the homeless on the streets, to a clinic serving the needs of sick, destitute, and orphaned children at the foot of the Andes in Peru, and a leper colony in West Africa (stopping on their journey to interview AIDS victims).
What these men found in their travels was amazing—happiness. Deformed, disfigured, and sick children bubble over with joy; a man crippled and scarred by leprosy shares his love of life; a woman dying of AIDS offers her children hope for the future. While none of the visitors were veterans of happy childhoods and functional families, they learned that there is so much more to life than just living it.
Directed by Charles Kinnane, The Human Experience is an exploration of what it means to be human and the things that connect us all. With a cadre of spiritual leaders and philosophers weighing in, it attempts to answer our most basic questions, “Who am I?” and “Why Am I Here?,” and does so without getting bogged down in pedantic rhetoric and abstract theory.
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