A Life's Work

Streaming video - 2019

What’s it like to dedicate your life to work that won’t be completed in your lifetime? Fifteen years ago, filmmaker David Licata focused on four projects and the people behind them in an effort to answer this universal question. The subjects are Jill Tarter, Director of the SETI Institute, who has been involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence since the 1970s and who was the basis for the Ellie Arroway character in Carl Sagan’s sci-fi novel, Contact; David and Jared Milarch, father and son tree farmers and co-founders of the Champion Tree Project, who clone old-growth trees to combat climate change; gospel music archivist Robert Darden, a journalism professor at Baylor University who founded the Black Gospel Music Resto...ration Project, an organization that is trying to identify, preserve, digitize, and catalog all of the at-risk recordings from the black gospel music tradition; Paolo Soleri, controversial architect behind Arcosanti, a town designed to test his theories about housing an overpopulated planet while also preserving and nurturing the natural environment; and Jeff Stein, Soleri’s mentee at Arcosanti in the 1970s and his successor after his death in 2013. Fittingly, the film begins with Soleri and ends with Stein ruminating about his mentor and what it means to carry on a legacy. We discover what inspired them to begin, what obstacles they face, what drives and sustains them, how they measure success of an endeavor they will not live to see completed. But most of all we discover that their lives really aren’t that different from everyone else’s: who hasn’t gazed at the stars and wondered if we are unique, nurtured a plant, sought ideal shelter, fell in love with a song and couldn’t wait to share it with someone? And who among us will truly see our work finished before we leave this earthly plain? more