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#31: Season 2 Kickoff: Sundance 2024 Documentary Archetypal Themes

October 29, 2024
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Last December, Wonder was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer, and facing an uncertain future we decided to collaborate on another Story All the Way Down season breaking down the archetypal dynamics of 36 Sundance documentaries. Bearing witness to the “creative treatment of actuality” as John Grierson has described documentaries was a healing balm that allowed us to share our mutual love of stories, but also experiment with new ways of talking about the underlying patterns of these stories. Nine months later we finally learned that her cancer treatments were successful, and she is currently cancer-free. I just had a chance to go back to edit and release over 20 hours of our conversations covering 36 of the slate of Sundance 2024 documentaries that we were able to watch. We share more about our thoughts, dreams, aspirations, and lives in relationship to these stories. This project was an opportunity to collaborate and spend some quality time together, but it’s also a deeply personal project as cancer forces you to confront your own mortality and it opens up a portal into what’s really important in life. We recorded these conversations not knowing what the future would hold for us, and it was a chance to immerse ourselves into so many different stories, experiences, ideas, and worlds, and then to find new ways to capture the essence of the different fundamental elements of these stories.

The Story All the Way Down podcast is a R&D project for us both where we can be a bit more experimental and explore new ways of understanding and talking about stories. Kent is an experiential journalist having covered over 500 immersive stories over the past decade, and Wonder is a professional astrologer and theater nerd who can’t help but use astrology in service to story. We use the archetypal language of astrology as an emerging narrative theory to describe the underlying patterns of context, quality, character, and story, but we also use other frameworks and lenses to unpack these stories. Whether astrology is useful as a predictive or divinatory tool is beyond the scope of this project. Philosopher Richard Tarnas has described astrology as being archetypally-predictive rather than concretely-predictive. In other words, it’s easier to look back on events that have already happened in order to talk about the underlying archetypal signatures rather than to attempt predictions which is more about trying to collapse the unbounded possibilities into specific actualities. This is the crux of our idea as astrology as a narrative theory, and it’s ultimate utility could be measured by whether or not we’re able to successfully elucidate some of the underlying dynamics of stories through these conversations.

Listed below are all 37 different episodes from Sundance 2024 of this second season of Story All the Way Down with the major themes listed that we used to categorize and structure our series of conversations.

Theme: Faith and Ritual

Theme: Deconstructing Dominant Power Systems

Theme: Family, Land, & Ancestors

Theme: Identity

Theme: Collective Movements

Theme: AI & Tech

Music Credit: spacedust by airtone

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Rough Transcript

[00:00:13.479] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. And I'm Wunder Breit. And welcome to the Story All the Way Down podcast. It's a podcast where we look at the archetypal dynamics of stories. Wunder, how would you describe what we're doing?

[00:00:26.349] Wonder Bright: I would say that we are looking at stories through the lens of astrology to try and understand the deeper themes and meaning that might emerge.

[00:00:35.695] Kent Bye: All right. Yeah. And I guess this is our second season of Story All the Way Down where we did this last year where it was a little bit of a impulsive last minute decision where I had managed to get a online accreditation for Sundance. I've normally covered the Sundance New Frontier, which is a lot of the virtual and augmented reality stories since 2016. And last year in 2023, they took a break. And again, this year I'm only having a couple of XR projects. And so I managed to get another accreditation. This time we watched 34 full length documentary pieces and another couple projects. So we're going to be covering 36 projects on this season of Story All the Way Down. And this time I meant to do it. Yes. So yeah, for me, I am very interested in understanding the underlying dynamics of the stories because I cover a lot of immersive storytelling in the context of virtual and augmented reality. I think there's a lot of new structures and forms of how we start to think about the dynamics of story and experiential design. And I found the more that I can start to identify the different qualities of the experience, the context of the experience, the character of the experience, and the story of the experience, that sort of becomes a memory palace of the story dynamics that are happening. I feel like with XR and VR and AR stories, they do a lot of transporting you into another space. So there's a lot of emphasis on the spatial context. I was just realizing, you know, what are the frameworks to help me understand these new dynamics that are emerging in the frontiers of immersive storytelling? And I found that the archetypal language and dynamics of astrology actually end up helping to describe a lot of these complicated dynamics of a story. So I guess part of this started with me wanting to say, hey, could this be an entirely new narrative theory that we could start to look at stories and use the language of astrology to break it down? So I feel like last year was the first iteration of that. And yeah, I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on that.

[00:02:32.475] Wonder Bright: So I think it's so interesting the way that you have started to use astrology as this protean narrative theory. And I, as you know, have some resistance to it as somebody who's been immersed in stories since childhood and just grew up with my father reading stories to me and my brother every night before bed until I was like 12. And I got my undergraduate degree in theater and Well, honestly, I just watch a lot of TV and I read a lot of books and I just love stories. And I'm always picking up on astrological themes when I'm watching films. But the thing that's the most interesting to me about that is less thinking of it as a narrative theory. and more as a way of understanding our culture and our times. Because you'll find these threads of meaning that are enhanced by understanding astrology. And I've been studying astrology for about 30 years. So the stories deepen my interest in astrology, and the astrology deepens my interest in stories. So I'm very curious about how you're beginning to think about astrology as a narrative theory. And my take is a little bit different, just because I tend to think about astrology as this ongoing collaborative collective project, because traditionally certain things mean certain things. But over the course of centuries, those things start meaning slightly different things. So even just if you look at something like Mars and Venus, Even whatever it was 30 years ago, John Gray writes this book, men are from Mars and women are from Venus. And we all kind of have this weird, simple understanding of that because men are martial, men are like the war god and women are the soft Venusian female goddess and like those are the two strata that the sexes, because of course, there's only two genders, get to inhabit. And that meaning has been completely turned up on its head in the last several decades. And so it's very interesting to me then to like start to think, well, how do we talk about Mars and Venus in a time where we no longer agree on what the original assignations meant? And so I love storytellers because typically storytellers and artists are on the cusp of the new conversation. They're the first people to identify how systems of oppression or longstanding traditional things that everybody else takes for granted. Maybe you aren't working on this particular body or in this particular instance. And so artists have this way of pushing the envelope of what culture actually can agree upon. And I just deeply believe in the power of stories and art and the people who create those things to alter the meaning in our culture. And so as an astrologer, I'm really curious to watch stories and to experience art to understand how people are beginning to change the meaning of these things. And because I think of it as this ongoing collaborative project, I'm really interested in our conversation as a way of exploring how those meanings are changing. And I think maybe especially because you and I often disagree about stuff, the way in which sometimes the new meanings arrive out of debate and earnest attention and interest in those things. So, you know, when we first started the podcast last year, when we were having the conversations, I didn't have this idea of like, Oh, this could be a podcast. It was something that we discovered through our conversation. But as we began to prepare for doing it this time, I really started to think about it differently. So I don't know, do you want to say a little bit about how you want to take this idea of narrative theory farther and like what you're hoping to create with the podcast this year?

[00:06:37.380] Kent Bye: Yeah. So I'm going to maybe unpack a little bit what I mean there because someone who may be listening to this could be thinking that astrology is the gold standard of pseudoscience and what are you doing? This is ridiculous. Why would you ever do this? I mean astrology within itself is extremely complicated. So to expect that someone who's casually interested in it would be able to understand the full complexity of astrology is a tall ask. So there's a lot of barriers for this idea. However, what I would say is that just like Richard Tarnas in Cosmos and Psyche, he took this idea of agroplanet transits within astrology and showed how these archetypal zeitgeists are repeating throughout different moments throughout history. And he made this amazing work of scholarship that shows how each of these archetypal dynamics combine together throughout the course of history that you can start to understand the cycles of history. And I feel like he was able to take what would normally be a branch of astrology called mundane astrology, which would be to look at astrology and interpret political large events. There's other branches of astrology like electional astrology to say the most auspicious time. There's horary astrology to answer very specific questions. And then there's natal astrology to look at the life of an individual native and to describe the nature and character of their life. And I feel like there are different ways that you can dip into different aspects of the astrological tradition to apply certain aspects to stories. In my own exploration of immersive stories, I found that the elements, so the earth, air, fire, water, are very helpful for identifying the fundamental phenomenological quality of the experience. So like the sense of agency and activity for fire element, or the sense of the mental and social presence of using language and abstractions of the air element, to be able to communicate or to make choices. And then you have the water element that is, you know, emotional tenor of a story, the consonants and sentence cycles that you see both in narrative, but also in music. And then you have the earth element, which is about the embodiment of actually being projected into an experience. So that's something that like just taking those four elements, I can start to see the embodiment and environmental design for the earth element and the narrative components and the emotional valency of the water element. And then with the air element, the diegetic elements, how are you making choices? How are the patterns and the mechanics of the experience being laid out? And then with the fire element, the agency locomotion, your desire, your will, and how is that experience receiving that? And so as films start to move into this more experiential mode of filmmaking, like there's a couple of films that we'll talk about that are more experiential, that even the filmmakers are saying this is more of an experience than a narrative, then we can start to lean upon these qualities of presence to start to unpack, okay, what is the sense of presence that is within the course of this quote-unquote experiential film? So I've also found that the houses are very much describing the topics and domains of human experience. And so you have these different contextual domains, and that's a lot of how I'm starting to look at what topics of life are being covered. And I also feel like in the course of documentary nonfiction versus fiction, documentary tends to show the relational dynamics of what's happening in the wide world and how we're situated within that context of the world, whereas fiction films tend to often be focused on the development of an individual character. I'm going to read this quote from Robert McKee that I often refer to as a baseline to how I'm thinking about this astrology as a narrative theory. So Robert McKee says, True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure. The greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character's essential nature. So what Robert McKee is essentially saying is that movies are all about watching other people make choices, take action, and all these contextual dimensions of those pressure that they're facing. And in the context of that pressure and what choices they're making, you get to see a part of the character that's being revealed. So then for me, I turn to the astrological tradition where you start to look at the planets and the aspects and the transits to see those different dynamics of how those choices may be happening or maybe the contextual dynamics that are happening in that person's life and what are the essential components of this person's character. So the language of astrology steps up to start to break down each of these quality of experience with the elemental aspects. But then you have the contextual dimensions of the houses, the domains of the human experience. And then you have the character dynamics, which are both the planets and the aspects that are happening. And then you have the story that's unfolding, which is any way that this is kind of unfolding over time, which you could look at transits or progressions or how do planet transits and the contextual zeitgeist. So that's sort of a rough recap for how I start to make some of these transitions. And so as I watch these films, I'm trying to break down both the contextual dimensions of what houses are being covered, what are the elements of character and what are the planetary significations? Are there some elemental significations? And then how can we start to think about the story that's unfolding and are there other deeper zeitgeist things that are happening in the outer planet transits and say the work of Richard Tarnas to help elaborate that. So that's a lot that I just dumped here, but that's at least how I'm starting to think about it and my approach and strategy. And I know we've tussled and gone back and forth and I know you have some different takes. And so as we start to unpack each of these different experiences, we're going to be having each of our different frameworks of looking at the different archetypal components of each of the stories. And hopefully at the end of the day, try to unpack the dynamics of the story and maybe put into relationship to other stories that we're watching that are ultimately trying to reflect the dynamics of the human experience.

[00:12:15.928] Wonder Bright: I think obviously astrology is a really complex subject and it's a total rabbit hole once you really start going down it. And I know that something we're both really keen to try and do is create a podcast that people can listen to wherever they're at with astrology. So I'm curious if you might want to break down your idea of narrative theory in something that is like a very simple way of putting it. I really love your idea of how different stories and different mediums use the elemental aspects so that you've created these like elemental theories of presence based on your work in virtual reality and XR technologies. And it's been really interesting over the years that we've been living together to have these debates about which show or which kind of medium is more of one element or another. And I actually think your narrative theory can be a pretty direct way of talking about something very simply and directly rather than totally abstract. So for instance, would you want to break down Reacher in terms of what houses you would see Reacher, this like very popular TV show that I'm obsessed with? What houses do you think Reacher takes place in and like how does that help you understand the show better?

[00:13:38.001] Kent Bye: Alright well you're putting me on the spot a little bit here just because I feel like fiction films tend to emphasize more the character traits of people rather than the contextual dynamics but Reacher as far as what I've seen the little amount of the Amazon TV show is basically he is a former military soldier who basically someone you want to throw something at, he'll find a solution to it. So he's kind of like the MacGyver, but someone who is solving these mysteries in a way. And so there's a certain dynamic of like, mysteriousness, like 12th house, like he's very secretive, and he doesn't have a fourth house home, he has very little belonging. So in terms of like second house possessions, he doesn't even have like a wardrobe. He's somebody who's really this nomadic person who is going across the country and dipping in and dipping out. He tends to have these romances, and so you have this kind of fifth house dynamic of his relationships with women. And then he's ultimately in this seventh house opposition where he's going to war or he's fighting. And he's got this history of being in the sixth house of the military and all this training from the military, but he's got this very Mars-like entity to his personality where he is very fearless and aggressive and just impulsively fire element, don't think and just take action. And it's very much an action show. So overall, the feeling of the fire element of like, how are people going to make choices and take action in the context of the potentiality of the eighth house of death, like these are life and death situations, he's going to these situations and he may die. So even just my rough take of seeing some of these different episodes of Reacher, how you can start to kind of break down these different contextual dynamics to reflect what is the type of character of Reacher. Okay, he doesn't have a home, he doesn't have any belongings, and he just is kind of this nomadic creature. That helps to understand what kind of person this is who would live a lifestyle like that. So when I think about astrology as a narrative theory, then you can start to break down some of these different fundamental components to understand the dynamics of a story. Even if you don't have the chart to be able to understand it, you can still break down. What makes a really interesting narrative is to have someone who has a really complex, nuanced, and perhaps even contradictory character when you see these different dynamics of the personality play out across all these different contextual dimensions. which in astrology has these 12 houses and these seven primary planets and three outer planets where you can start to map out and speak about it metaphorically without having to rely upon a specific chart. But you can start to use the building blocks and elements of astrology to break down the story. So I don't know how... How'd you do?

[00:16:19.556] Wonder Bright: I think that was great. And yeah, I just want to like add on to that some thoughts about like what contextual domains or houses I would place the show in. And I just want to like say for anybody who isn't into astrology the way we are like the houses basically are areas of life. There's 12 houses in astrology and each house represents an area of life. So you mentioned the sixth house for Reacher because the sixth house is the house of military service. The 12th house is the house of somebody who is essentially a loner and is pretty isolated, could potentially be fairly nomadic and quite enigmatic and mysterious. Those are two houses that really capitalize on who this person is. So I think we've kind of established how we might be able to use astrology as a narrative theory by talking about the story of Reacher and how it explicates these experiences in life through a very specific focus of this particular story of a character who has these particular traits, who's in the military, who is nomadic and wanders. And I think for me, what I'm most interested in exploring is how we might actually use astrology with stories as a way of pointing people to stories that might have the power to heal them or help them through a situation that they're in. So one of my favorite astrologers, Rob Hand, has said that astrology is a diagnostic tool. It actually doesn't offer the potential for a cure. And I think in the West, that's pretty true. That's pretty accurate. In the Western tradition of astrology, we don't have a lineage that we are all following to say that this or that can cure different problems, different signatures that might come up in a chart. But in the East, in Indian astrology, or we call it Vedic astrology here in the West, in Vedic astrology, they have a long storied history of giving people what they would call a remedial measure when there's a problem that they see in the chart. And oftentimes, those remedial measures show up as like a jewel or a gemstone that you wear on your third ring, and that's going to remediate a problem with Saturn or an issue with Mars or whatever that thing is. And so this is a way that Indian astrologers for centuries have been trying to find ways of curing difficulties that they see in a chart and that doing those remedial measures might in some way help people. And as somebody who's been deeply immersed in stories my whole life, I have found stories incredibly valuable and very healing. And so I'm interested in what it might look like if we used these stories as remedial measures. So when we're watching a story and we come up with a narrative theory around it that sort of identifies what the key signatures are that we can point to in a piece, then we can also tag it with Are you having a Saturn problem? Are you having an issue with your mom? Is your moon in detriment? Is your 10th house afflicted in some way and career is hard for you? Watch this movie. You might find some solace. You might find some strategies. You might find an insight or a way of thinking about something that expands your worldview. And I think that's especially useful in a time where, as we were saying at the beginning, we're changing how we think about things. We're changing what we think of gender. We're changing what we think of sex. We're having a new conversation about race and about oppression, about capitalism and all these things that are also going to change the signatures, the astrological signatures that we've been pointing to for millennia. So I think there's this really interesting place that storytelling can occupy where there's this opportunity for us to point to stories that have the seed of healing for our cultures. And that could never be more true than it might be of Sundance, which premieres films from new filmmakers from all over the world every year. And it's a really extraordinary event and you've talked to me about it before and I would love to hear you talk again about why it's so special and like how you think of it and why you've pointed to it as being such a seminal part of your life.

[00:20:57.051] Kent Bye: Yeah, well Sundance is celebrating their 40th edition this year. And so it's been a huge platform and opportunity to go beyond the existing studio system and to really promote independent film. And it's launched a lot of different careers, but it's also an opportunity to tell stories that may not get told anywhere else. And so Sundance has been curating both the fiction and nonfiction stories. There's 17,000 submissions that they got this year, both across the short films and their feature films. And they had around like 100 feature films or so. And on the order of 50 short films, it's a small percentage of the number of submissions that they get that they're selected. So what they end up selecting ends up being a real criminal crop of not only the stories that they as curators see are crucial and vital for reflecting what's happening in the world. It's basically like taking the sampling of a cultural zeitgeist and definitely have the experience over the years of going and seeing a bunch of films at Sundance and then seeing how the archetypal dynamics of the themes and the stories that are watched, and now playing out throughout the course of the year, because it's a little bit of a sneak peek of what's to come, and to allow us to understand what are the different archetypal dynamics that are unfolding right now, but what we might be expecting in the future. And Richard Tarnas is really, I think, one of the preeminent contemporary philosophers and authors of astrology that have really laid out a beautifully argued set of evidence in Cosmos and Psyche, where he basically does this in the book, where he's trying to identify these outer planet archetypal complexes that are happening across time that you can use to start to unpack what's happening

[00:22:40.956] Wonder Bright: Yeah, so I think one way of potentially unpacking the zeitgeist that emerged at Sundance is obviously to use astrology, because astrology is good for prediction. And one of the main ways that astrologers would do something like that is to talk about what we call transits. And a transit is essentially when planets, which the ancient Greeks named planets because planet in ancient Greek means wanderer. So the planets are wandering across the firmament of fixed stars. And as they cross the firmament, they have relationships with one another and they transit one another. They move past one another. They make connections with one another. Conjunctions are usually a big one. And so we've had a series of conjunctions that have just passed. We had the Saturn-Pluto conjunction. We had a Saturn-Jupiter conjunction. Upcoming in April, we have a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. And those conjunctions are really considered to be powerful indicators of different forces that might be emerging in a culture and a time. And so it's very interesting when we look at the crop of films that have come up this year that are carrying on from themes from last year and the year before, because that Saturn-Pluto conjunction that I mentioned that happened in 2020 has really led to a whole unfolding in ways that we would expect as astrologers thinking about Saturn and Pluto, which are considered to be really difficult planets, which are concerned with power and control, domination, oppression, but also like genuine power. And the fact that these two planets conjoined in Capricorn was especially meaningful because here in the States, Pluto was actually in Capricorn when it was founded, and this is the first time that it's returned to that spot that it occupied when the United States was founded. So the fact that we've had a Saturn-Pluto conjunction at the same time that we were going through that Pluto return was considered to be a really important point in our country's history. And we can see these events unfolding worldwide, that there is this conversation worldwide around who's in control. Do we want to continue with the way things are? Do we want to have autocracies? Do we want to have democracies? How did we get here? And there's been this like real unpacking of how we got here by certain segments of the cultures. And then there's been this real desire to hang on to power from other people in those cultures. And, you know, I think Richard Tarnas speaks really eloquently to that when he talks about Saturn Pluto transits. I don't know if you want to read what he has to say about that.

[00:25:35.905] Kent Bye: Yeah, and one thing that Tarnas says around prediction, because you said astrology is good at prediction, well Tarnas has a caveat. He says that astrology is not concretely predictive, but archetypally predictive. And what does that mean? It means that when you look at the chart, you don't know how all of the range of potentialities are going to collapse into one actual event. you can only understand these archetypal potentialities as a sort of multi-faceted diamond with lots of different possibilities. There's a set of possibilities that are combining with another set of possibilities, and so it's a bounded set of possibilities that makes it archetypally predictive, but not concretely predictive. Sometimes you have to actually see how something plays out, and then in retrospect you can look back and start to understand how that plays out. But I wanted to just give a little bit of Tarnas's prediction around the Saturn-Pluto because you can just think about what was happening in January of 2020 when we had some of the exact configurations of Saturn-Pluto, which as everybody now knows is that was really the beginning of the pandemic. So I'm going to read a little bit of what he says about both Saturn and Pluto and then the combination for when they come together. So Tarnas describes Saturn as the principle of limit, structure, contraction, constraint, necessity, hard materiality, concrete manifestation, time, the past, tradition, age, maturity, mortality, the endings of things, gravity and gravitas, weightiness, that which burdens, binds, challenges, fortifies, deepens, the tendency to confine and constrict, to separate, to divide and define. And then for Pluto, he says that Pluto represents the underworld and underground in all senses, elemental, geological, instinctual, political, social, sexual, urban, criminal, mythological, demonic. It's the dark, mysterious taboo and often terrifying reality that lurks beneath the surface of things, beneath the ego, societal conventions, the veneer of civilization, beneath the surface of the earth that is periodically unleashed in destructive transformative force. Pluto impels, burns, consumes, transfigures, resurrects, and he goes on and on and on. I mean, these paragraphs that he has, he's just listing all these significations. But I think throughout the course of the book, Tarnas will look at how there's different correspondences between Saturn and Pluto, quadrature configurations that are aligned with the beginning of World War I, World War II. We have the beginning of the Cold War, 1946 to 47. And then you have like the middle of the 60s with the Vietnam War was an opposition of Saturn and Pluto. You have the beginning of the 80s, you have the Reagan conservative revolution that's happening. And then 9-11 was also a Saturn opposite to Pluto. So you have these moments of just real intense beginning of new eras. And this Saturn-Pluto at the beginning of the pandemic was also in the same type of diachronic archetypal signification. So I'm just going to read this little section to give you a flavor of how he's describing this combination. The Saturn-Pluto cycle coincided with especially challenging historical periods, marked by a pervasive quality of intense contraction, eras of international crisis and conflict, empowerment of reactionary forces and totalitarian impulses, organized violence and oppression, all sometimes marked by lasting traumatic effects. An atmosphere of gravity and tension tended to accompany these three- to four-year periods, as did a widespread sense of epochal closure, the quote, end of an era. the end of innocence, the destruction of an earlier mode of life that, in retrospect, may seem to have been marked by widespread indulgence, decadence, naivete, denial, and inflation. Profound transformation was a dominant theme, as with the Uranus-Pluto cycle, but here the transformation was through contraction, conservative reaction, crisis, and termination." And to me, it's like, wow, that describes the quality of what the pandemic felt like to me.

[00:29:30.931] Wonder Bright: Yeah, and a lot of other events that happened during the pandemic, certainly in the United States, we can look to the George Floyd protests, there's been a huge unpacking around Native and indigenous peoples and also around black Americans. And we've had a lot of conversations about gender and transgender peoples that are really at the sharp end of a pointy stick right now. People's lives are under threat. And at the same time, we have people speaking into these experiences in a way that is extremely powerful. And there's an opportunity for those of us who are listening and really engaged in these conversations to become much better human beings. much more compassionate and more fully expressed ourselves. So there's this immense darkness, but there's also this potential for an extraordinary change. So it's very obvious when we're watching these films at Sundance that a lot of these films are carrying on from that basic space. that that transit feels like it's still alive and it's still really working through these artists and our times, which I think all of us are feeling that anyway. But when we're watching these films, so many of them touch on these themes or are pulling out from these themes. We didn't group all of the films in that particular category, but that is one of the categories that we chose to structure how we're going to tell the story of all of these movies. That's one of the zeitgeists that we definitely picked up on. Do you have anything else that you want to say about that particular category?

[00:31:22.859] Kent Bye: No, I mean as we go through these different movies, we've created these different clusters of films and sometimes I feel like there's a real strong connection for each of the films to that theme. Sometimes it's more of a rough theme where I maybe would have a disagreement or other ways of thinking about the specific significations of an individual film. I think that's a part of the conversation that we're going to be having is how we start to make sense of how each of the films fit into that broader theme that we've put it into, but also our unique take of how we start to think about each of these different pieces. It'll be a process of us deliberating and discussing and exploring some of the different archetypal dynamics. I think the language of astrology affords us to start to have lots of different opinions on things, because with astrology there's a lot of complexity, a lot of multiple ways you could look at it, a lot of nuance, and so there's a lot of disagreement amongst other astrologers for what's the most salient aspects of different stories. But yeah, I feel like as we have an opportunity to go through each of these different films, we're going to have a way of describing and maybe talking more generally about each of the different pieces and then diving into some of the more nuances of the archetypal dynamics.

[00:32:35.717] Wonder Bright: Yeah. So obviously, the Pluto Saturn conjunction is one that we're really pointing to as a genuine marker of not just the films this year, but films in the last year and the year before that. So we have a category of films that we're going to go into as a measure of that zeitgeist. But almost all of the films are impacted by it in some way or another, because if we're of this time, we're going to be impacted by that theme. But they're not all impacted by that theme. And there are other themes that emerged through the other transits that we talked about. So one of the main themes that we're looking at is the upcoming Jupiter Uranus conjunction in Taurus, which is usually connected to technological advances. So Ken, I wonder if you wanted to talk about that one a little bit.

[00:33:26.246] Kent Bye: Yeah, so Jupiter-Uranus is a cycle that happens like oppositions and conjunctions happen roughly around once every seven years, but they tend to align with a lot of technological breakthroughs and innovation. The principle of Jupiter, just reading from Tarnas, He says it's the principle of expansion, magnitude, growth, elevation, superiority, the capacity and impulse to enlarge and grow, to ascend and progress, to improve and magnify, to incorporate that which is external, to make greater wholes, to inflate, to experience success, honor, advancement, plenitude, abundance, prodigality, excess, suffite. So in essence, it's something that's just really expanding everything that it touches. And then for Uranus, he says, every major theme and quality that astrologers associate with the planet Uranus seems to be reflected in the myth of Prometheus, with striking poetic exactitude, the initiation of radical change, the passion for freedom, the defiance of authority, the act of cosmetic rebellion against a universal structure to free humanity of bondage, the the urge to train sane limitation, the creative impulse, the intellectual brilliance and genius, the element of excitement and risk. Also, Prometheus' style in outwitting the gods where he used subtle stratagems and unexpected timing to upset the established order. Often astrologers talk about this idea of a lightning bolt, where it's like this strike that is shocking and unpredictable, but it also tends to diffuse some tensions that are there. So you have this unpredictability to the Uranian nature with this Jupiter sense of expansion an expansion of unpredictable novel times where we have like Apple's launching the Apple Vision Pro. As of this recording, it's coming out tomorrow on Friday. By the time this is released, it will already be out. I will already have mine and being able to play with it. And so there's this idea that virtual and augmented reality have been really incubating since the end of the 60s, where it was really first catalyzed with like, say, the outer planet transits of both Uranus and Pluto during that time. Then you have Uranus and Neptune. You have another wave in the 90s that you have the next wave of virtuality. Then you have a Saturn-Neptune wave that started in 1989 with the Game Boy. Then you have the BlackBerry 1999 with the first quarter square. You have the opposition that was happening in 2007 when you had the iPhone that was coming out, but you also had a Jupiter-Uranus square. In that context, you have the iPhone, which was a huge paradigm shift in computing from desktop and laptops into mobile computing. Then you have the emergence of virtual augmented reality in 2015 to 2016 with the third quarter square of Saturn and Neptune. Now you have with virtual augmented reality coming up with the beginnings of Saturn-Neptune that's going to have a conjunction coming up here in 2025, but in terms of Trinastian orbs are already well within that. But this moment of the Jupiter Uranus is kind of like a highlight of lots of unexpected technological innovations. So this year at Sundance, we're seeing a lot of AI films and people interacting with AI, pushing the limits of what AI can do. And then you have what is unknown, what other technological innovations may come out, whether we're going to have like superconducting breakthroughs, innovations, or quantum computing. I mean, it's really kind of like a grab bag where it could be any sort of unknown innovations. I mean, we could have people in the government coming out and saying that we have reverse-engineered UFO technology. I mean, it's something like that where you have really shocking paradigm-shifting information that starts to come out during this period. It's really the heart of it is in April 2024, but we're kind of in this zeitgeist of this moment, already seeing a number of films that are tapping into that this year.

[00:37:11.219] Wonder Bright: Yeah, so I sort of created a rough template of like how I wanted to go through the story of what we watched as we watched it. But the two categories that we just named are the two big ones that you can really point to and say, this is a zeitgeist that is directly linked to these transits, these outer planetary transits. The other categories that I created are sometimes explorations of how those transits are playing out in individual lives. Sometimes they're explorations of how people are working with these experiences. And sometimes they're not necessarily directly tied to those transits, but they just are within a theme of something that I thought was really interesting that I wanted to look at because Some of these themes are not necessarily zeitgeists across the spectrum of Sundance, but they were the things that really came up for me. And I don't ever want to say that we know for sure what any of these films mean or how they should be tagged astrologically. As you will no doubt hear, Kent and I have lots of disagreements. agreements that we love to get into around what something means. And our hope is that in engaging with that debate with one another, that it opens up a place for other people to engage in that debate with the same kind of respect for one another that we hold for each other. And also, I chose to create these categories the way that I did because I wanted to map out some of the things that I was thinking about as we were watching it. And I'll get into like how I created it and why in a minute. But first, I just want to like say roughly what the categories are that we're going to be talking about. So the first category of films that we're going to look at, I'm bracketing under the category of faith and ritual. And if you've been listening to us for the last few minutes, you will understand why perhaps it's so important for us to be able to have a place that we can throw our faith into when times are uncertain like they are right now. it's really difficult sometimes to be able to like place yourself in the world in a way that has meaning. And so there were several films that we saw at Sundance that really touched me and moved me deeply in terms of how people were speaking about their faith and how they enact their faith. So in astrology, when we talk about religion or faith, we're talking about ninth house, the ninth house is the It has to do with the area of life where we create a philosophy for living or for rule. It has to do with long distance travel, higher education, philosophy, religion, law, anything where you kind of get a higher perspective on things. Then we also have the third house opposite the ninth house, which has to do with the kinds of rituals that we go through in order to enact that philosophy or that law. or that religion. The third house also has to do with communications and short distance travels, your neighbors, your immediate environment, your siblings, like how people are finding their faith, how they're holding themselves true in this time. You know, they could easily fall under the bracket of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction. But I wanted to give them their own place because it felt to me that these filmmakers were talking about things that were ways of giving meaning to people's lives that weren't just describing the experience of Saturn Pluto, but were actually finding a way to like operate with meaning inside these difficult times. So I don't know if you wanted to say anything about that category of films or how you're thinking about it.

[00:41:03.263] Kent Bye: Well, it helped a lot to read through Demetra's origins of the delineation between the ninth house and the third house, because it really starts with the joys of the moon having its joy in the third house and the sun having its joy in the ninth house. Demetra George in Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice, Volume 2, she says, The Hellenistic astrologers used the name Selene when speaking about the moon. In Greek mythology, Selene was the goddess of the moon, whose brother was Helios, god of the sun. These siblings were born from the union of deities personifying the lights and the heavens and the sky. And so starting from that sibling relationship, then you get the signification of a third house with siblings, And then you want to travel to your siblings. And so you go to your siblings and when you travel and you're short distance, then you are communicating. So from that communication, it becomes communication and gossip and learning. But then it's contrasted to the journey of the sun, which is a lot longer than the journey of the moon. And so you get this dialectic between the sun and the moon that is really driving some of these significations, but also how each of them were this liminal space or this gap and how that gap was leading to religion and being at that edge of what is known, not known, having to have faith because you can't empirically experience that. And so because of that, you start to have these significations of religion and philosophy and higher education as contrasted to the early education. So anyway, there's a dialectic between the third house and the ninth house that is really clear for how there can be some polarity relationships between the houses. But these sets of films, they end up taking a pilgrimage in a lot of ways. of trying to find different information or healing or aspects of faith and religion that are playing throughout, and also ideas of philosophy. So yeah, those are themes that are kind of in the films that we're going to be talking about in that batch.

[00:42:57.045] Wonder Bright: Yeah, there's some Sixth House themes that come up in that batch as well, where, you know, like we were talking about Reacher being a military man and that because he's a man of service, he has something in common with religious folk, nuns and monks who give up their worldly possessions and they devote themselves to a spiritual practice. And that's also a meaning of the sixth house and the twelfth house, that people who are willing to not be in the world, but willing to throw themselves into acts of devotion to a person, place or thing, that that's a real sixth house experience. And so there's some films in there that have to do with that as well. So yeah, so that's the first category that we'll be talking about. The second category, we're going to just go real hard on the Saturn Pluto conjunction in a category that I'm calling deconstructing dominant power systems. I think Sundance has correctly identified that that is one of the most powerful places that storytellers are coming from right now. In particular, we have black and brown and indigenous people from all over the world. speaking about what it's like to be on the receiving end of dominant systems of power and really breaking down what that looks like and the impact that it's having on them. And I think there's an opportunity for all of us watching these films and participating in these stories to really start to understand how these larger systems are affecting not only these populations, but all populations. what it means for us if you're like me and Ken and you're white and your body is not directly impacted by some of those power systems, but how it's still impacting us because nobody wins in these systems. It only benefits very, very few people. And even then, the benefits come strictly in terms of capitalist gains in ways that I'm going to argue might deprive one of one's humanity. And so there's really strong medicine in these films about what's available if we're really able to, like, sit still and take in these stories, which are not just information, but deep teaching about the way that humanity structures itself and what it's costing us to do that.

[00:45:20.800] Kent Bye: Lots of really big themes that are digging into sexism, racism, capitalism, the structures of power that we have in our society and how those can be oppressive in different ways. And you could really add a whole bunch of other films that have this signification, but we're starting with five that are really reflecting this. And again, I think a lot of times these are things that have been existing for a really long time. It's not like this is the beginning of some of these stories. And sometimes with astrology, you have as a story, when it's coming into prominence, it's carrying a signature of that moment when it's coming out. But those diachronic cycles of the origins of those stories go back for many, many generations and millennia, even when you start to think about these dynamics of power and how they've been playing out throughout the course of history. So yeah, we'll be unpacking that. And I think that's probably one of the sections that has one of the more clear connections to the Saturn-Pluto complex that we have, really investigating some of these different underlying systems of power and how they're impacting us in a specific way. And so made and created and edited within the crux of the pandemic, which we're still seeing a lot of pandemic films of folks that really either had finished a wrapped up production or have been working and editing on these projects throughout the course of the pandemic. So we're seeing a lot of that signature that I imagine we'll be tracing out for a long time because a lot of these are really perennial themes that we continue to see each and every year, but we're just clustering them into this section as a current zeitgeist of what are the next chapters of these stories to be told.

[00:46:53.911] Wonder Bright: Yeah, and with that, a lot of the films that we're going to be talking about in other sections will be tagged on our website as Saturn Pluto stories, even if they aren't in the category of explicitly Saturn Pluto, because we chose to put them in a different category just to create a through line for the story that we want to tell as we watched it and as we talk about it. So one of the main categories that you can see this Saturn Pluto conjunction having an impact on is in the fourth house of family, land and ancestors, which is a topic that all those three things can be described by the astrological fourth house. That house is about the area of family, land and ancestors. And so that's a whole category that we're going to be going through because a number of the films spoke really eloquently to what those experiences are like, not necessarily explicitly in a Saturn-Pluto way, but in ways that really speak into the deeper themes of family land and ancestors when there's a battle for them or when there's strife, you know, in your family of origin and what it means to be deprived of the land that your ancestors have been living on, for instance. And so we just wanted to be able to dive in deeply to the films that we're exploring those themes in ways that we found especially evocative and meaningful, because that's really the foundational place in anybody's natal chart. And it's literally the foundational place. It's the fourth house. It's the land that we're standing on. It's your home. So it's a really primal space to occupy. And there were some films that really touched on those themes that were really powerful.

[00:48:41.360] Kent Bye: And that can range from everything from the impacts of the earth and climate change all the way down to very personal family stories and their relationship to the land and how do you continue on traditions of land stewardship. So yeah, there's some good connective themes looking at different aspects of the nature, but also looking at home, family and land.

[00:49:03.914] Wonder Bright: So then another category that I created is a category that I'm calling identity, which relates to the astrological first house. So the first house is the house of self, your body, your parents, your health. And any time you go to Sundance, you're going to see biopics. So all biopics are going to be a first house experience because it's a real deep exploration of one person's identity. And I think there's been a real effort on the part of the programmers at Sundance to also explore what does identity mean in a deeper sense. So although we have put the biopics in this category, we've also included a couple of films at the start of that category, which explicitly are looking at identity in terms of something that can be questioned less as like, oh, this person's identity is X, Y, or Z, and more about how do we construct our identity in a culture which oppresses what they think our identity is. So this is a topic that is obviously really important for anybody who finds themselves at the intersection of different ways of being, whether they're black or indigenous, female, male. Like when we talk about intersectionality, we're going to be talking about how hard it is to forge your identity in a culture which opposes this or that aspect of your identity. And so a couple of the films are really looking at those things in a way that is really refreshing and powerful and exciting and stimulating, because even if we don't identify as the way that this person is identifying themselves, there's an opportunity to really think about how our identity is constructed in the culture at large and what that means to us and how we might think about doing that differently. And then there's also just, as always at Sundance, a fantastic slew of just really great biopics that I'm excited to talk about and share with everyone.

[00:51:04.789] Kent Bye: Yeah. And one point to make about identity is in reading Demetra's description of the evolution of the different houses in the ancient times, the first house was the native, it was the individual, it was the person, and all the other topics we're talking about. explicit external aspects of their lives that were not always representative of who they are. But I think as time has gone on, especially with modern psychological astrology, as well as understanding the dynamics of identity and the dynamics of who we are as people, is that all these different contextual domains, whether it's who we are with our partners, who we are at home, who we are at work, these are different fractal representations of who we are. And so we can start to see how the biopics, if you really want to understand the full complexity of someone, then often they'll be jumping around to like, okay, here's how this person was at work. Here's how they were in their personal life. Here's how they were in their family or their creative pursuits. And so there's an opportunity here to kind of dive in between the different houses and to see how biopics and astrology are really kind of made for each other to start to look at. Sometimes we'll have their natal chart, sometimes we'll have their timed chart, sometimes we'll just pick out very specific astrological configurations to maybe dive into maybe a deeper sense of the dynamics of some of their characters, some of their challenges. If we don't have timed charts, then we're limited in terms of knowing how some of these different planetary configurations and aspects are playing out into the specific domains of their lives. But we can start to talk at a high level, rough metaphoric sense of like, here's some of the other stuff that we can see in their natal chart that is a fundamental tension that's playing out throughout the course of their lives. And so that'll be a fun time to really dig into the meat of natal astrology and how that plays out in the context of something like biopics throughout the course of these documentaries.

[00:52:53.225] Wonder Bright: Yeah. Some of my favorite films were in that collection for sure. So we have two more categories to go. One is collective movements. So that would be an 11th house concern as an astrological signature. So in this category, we're going to be looking at some of the things that have been emerging over the last few years of people really coming together to work against systems in power, to try and get other people to work with them and what that might take and how that looks on the ground. There were a couple of really great films that we got to see this week that really unpacked what that looks like and were at turns infuriating and very, very inspiring because it's no small thing right now to try and organize people.

[00:53:48.191] Kent Bye: Yeah, and when Demetrius is talking about delineating the meanings of the 11th house, it's really starting from the origin of having Jupiter there as its joy. So it has this sense of good spirit. It's a benefic and it's opposite to the fifth house, which is the joy of Venus, which is really about good fortune. And so you have this dialectic between good fortune and good spirit. But in that good spirit, you have friends, and you also have collective movements and shared group identity. Whereas the fifth house might be individual self-expression, you have the 11th house as collective expression. And so what are the ways that we are forming our identity together? And so these films that can be everything from collective movements, but also films that have a friendship dimension and how that ends up being a key part of the dynamics of the story that's being told.

[00:54:36.184] Wonder Bright: Yeah and it's probably worth pointing out at this point that like there are ways in which systems of power try to tear us away from having close relationships with people. Literally a recurring theme amongst the films at Sundance was how dominant systems of power will remove children from families, remove parents from families and make it really hard for people to collectively bargain and come together either as a family or as a collective bargaining tool. And so these films are really important to watch because they're talking about what it takes to do that kind of work. when the systems in power don't want you to. And so there's a real struggle to really put the joy back in the 11th house. Essentially, it's not so easy anymore. Like the place that we're all congregating these days, not so much Facebook and Twitter is certainly going away, but like we're still congregating virtually and digitally in ways that have relied on algorithms to separate us rather than bring us together. That's not the whole story, as we'll see when we get to the next section, but it's definitely like a drumbeat that's been happening. So when there's an opportunity to see people coming together despite all of that and create a collective movement or a collective expression, it's really exciting. So that's something we get to explore when we talk about that.

[00:56:10.549] Kent Bye: Yeah. Do you want to go into the last section?

[00:56:13.550] Wonder Bright: Yeah. So the last section is going to be the one where we talk about AI and new technologies. And there's a few films that we're going to get to talk about there that explore more deeply the impact of AI on the world right now and how that's showing up. So that one, we've talked about the astrological aspect that we're looking at for that, which is the Jupiter conjunct Uranus. in April in the wake of the Saturn Jupiter conjunction in Aquarius and Pluto moving into Aquarius as well.

[00:56:47.484] Kent Bye: Lots of air element aspects there as well, but also just looking at the latest technological innovations. I think what's surprising is that usually there's a pretty wide gap between movements of technology and how long it takes for some of these films to make it to Sundance. I was actually quite surprised to see how many pieces that had really evolved stories that were digging into this. It's kind of a sign of things to come where I feel like there's going to be questions that are being asked within these documentaries that are going to continue to be asked. As we continue to have these breakthrough innovations with things like larger language models that are really quite impressive in what it can do, but also there's a lot of limitations. Some of these films can play into the hashtag AI hype, which is fulfilling the story that a lot of these technologies are like these super powerful, mysterious things, but also a lot of opportunities to kind of dig into the darker sides and limitations and the constraints and sometimes even the harms that can come from these technologies when they're not complete and they're still haven't reached the stage of quote unquote artificial general intelligence that is at the stage where it's at this next epoch of what's possible with these technologies. So it's really a sign of where things are at and where they may go. And it's still an unknown as to some of the promises of eighth house themes of immortality and transhumanist ideations of being able to essentially capture our first house identity or full complexity of our identity and have this kind of digital immortality. It's a theme that comes up a couple of times, but also ways to kind of memorialize people who have had very rich experiences within the context of these virtual worlds and being able to kind of recap transcending limitations of your physical limitations and how you can get to the essence or spirit or the soul of who you are as a person and a character in the context of a virtual world where no one knows what may be happening on the other side of the screen. Those are some interesting themes that are emerging this year that are all continuing to be developing as we have this larger cycle of Saturn-Neptune, which started in 1989 and then is now coming in 2024-2025 of this new epoch. Saturn conjunct Neptune at zero degrees Aries. It's the beginning of a new cycle at the beginning of the zodiac. Some of these films are pointing us to like, is this a new cycle? What's the disillusioned aspects, the Neptunian aspects of like this is fake news or something that's not real, more imaginal or coming from a place of illusion? What's going to be real? What's the Saturnian aspect of where things are actually going to be grounded? I think the types of technologies of both AI and virtual worlds, virtual augmented reality, XR, spatial computing, all these things are diffusing those boundaries a little bit more around the diffusive nature of Neptune and the physicality and the reality of the Saturnian aspect. Anyway, that's where we'll be ending this whole journey.

[00:59:49.015] Wonder Bright: It's interesting as I'm listening to you go through that. I had intuitively come up with these categories and placed them in the order that I did. And as I'm listening to you, I'm like thinking, why did I put this category last? Because on the one hand, it's an interesting category in that it's looking to the future more than any of the others. Like in a lot of ways, the other ones are looking at the past and like unpacking how we got here. And then this category, there's a lot of people who are really looking into the future, like, what are we going to be next? And as you say, there's this real transhumanist vibe for a lot of the the people that the stories are focused on are really thinking about it in this way of like, we're going to like become better than human. We're going to vanquish death. We're going to like get rid of it, you know, and. Like, I would always have a problem with that. And it was especially irritating me in this moment in my life because I've recently had a really unwelcome diagnosis, which is that I was diagnosed with rectal cancer in December. So, I just started treatment a couple days ago. So right now I feel fine. I can still drink coffee. I'm eating pretty much the way I normally do. I have great energy, you know. So I've had like a month and a half to kind of get used to this, my world shifting on its axis. And I'll tell you the thing that's helped me the most in this month and a half is not some fantasy about death doesn't exist or like screw mortality. It's like, no, I have felt more alive in the last month than I maybe have felt in like five or six years. And it's because I'm running up against my mortality. Now Kent and I had some conversations about whether or not this was something that we wanted to share in this podcast. And ultimately, I'm coming down on the side of like, I do want to share about it because Well, first of all, it's the most interesting thing that's happening to me right now. It's really scary. And I imagine is just going to get scarier, you know, as my treatment progresses and I start experiencing the side effects of radiation and chemotherapy. And if I have to have a surgery, then the side effects of that as well, like this is this is not going to be easy. But it's real. Like it's what's happening. And there was such solace watching these films. Because people were being really honest about things that were really hard. And it gave me so much encouragement to be able to like do the same thing. So I just want to share that this is something that Kent and I are going through because it really informed a lot of the ways that we were viewing the films that we watched together. To start with, there were a lot of people whose lives have been touched by cancer. That's probably always true, but like this year we noticed because we're like, oh, hey, that's us. And it altered our experience of watching it. So I know that it's going to be hard for us to talk about those films without talking about what it meant to us. And at the same time, I don't want to make those films about my cancer diagnosis. So I just wanted to share it with everybody here at the start so that there would be a place people could go to to understand what I'm talking about and why I'm saying it. Right now, my doctors have been really clear that they're treating me for a cure. The kind of cancer that I have and the stage that it's at, there's a 73% survival rate. And honestly, Kent and I, if there's one thing we like to do, it's research. So we've been doing a pretty deep dive into understanding this cancer. Just even in the last decade, the treatments for colorectal cancer have really improved and changed. And I have great medical care. My doctors are incredible. My family's been amazing. And I could not have better friends. I have been so well taken care of. And well, I have Kent. I have Kent. which is all I ever wanted, to be honest, this person sitting across from me right now. So I just want everybody who's hearing this, who might be scared or alarmed or concerned, to know that, you know, I have every intention of living through this. And I have every tension of living into this. So whatever the outcome is, my desire is to live as fully as I can throughout this whole process and this journey. And if there's anything that I've learned from the artists that I've been fortunate to watch this week, it's that there is a lot to be said for fighting. There's a lot to be said for being present to the world around us. And there's a lot to be said for the act of creating. And I really look forward to having these conversations with Ken and creating this podcast together and hopefully to be creating a conversation with our listeners who might want to participate in a conversation about how we could use astrology as a narrative theory and how we can think about how astrology is changing as the culture is changing.

[01:06:05.120] Kent Bye: You know, there's a number of films that watching it just kind of pierce and hit a certain cord in my being that it's like this empathy that you get from listening to other people's stories and projecting yourself into a future reality that may not exist, or an identification of different parts of our lived experience that we're also going through. And so, yeah, there's ways that, given this news, some of the stories hit differently. And I think it'd be difficult to talk about some of those stories without really talking about how they're connected to our lives. Not that we want to center our own story, but we want to elaborate for how these stories are speaking to us and why they're moving us so much. And, you know, this is like one of the most amazing experiences I can have with you is to just basically have this virtual Sundance in our home. We're watching 36 total projects, 56 hours, and what's essentially five days, but we got some screeners. So we watched about 12 hours or so ahead of time for a couple of days. But over the course of seven days, that's around eight hours a day of just watching these films. We had the privilege this year of seeing a lot of Q&As to be able to help set the context for both before and after the films. And so just a lot of really amazing stories that we're able to dive into. And I'm really excited to go on this journey of unpacking these stories and to breaking down the different components and to do this kind of creative exploration. It's like an idea. It's a really wild idea. Hey, astrology could be a narrative theory. Let's watch 56 hours of documentaries and let's apply it as a narrative theory. And documentary, I want to just also give a shout out to the form of documentary, William Uricchio is a historian of documentary that I've interviewed for the Voices of VR, and he was a co-author of a book on collective intelligence. And he adds in the statistic in there that documentary is often one of the frontiers of new stories. 90% of all of the copywritten films in the first decade of all films were documentary. the first mobile audio, some of the first color films. So whenever there's a new technology, documentary is right there at the forefront. And so as I've been covering virtual augmented reality, documentary as a form has been at the forefront of helping to shape the new structures and forms of immersive storytelling. And so as we look at this crop of nonfiction documentaries at Sundance, We're in the spirit of that experimental aspect of looking at the actuality of what's happening in life and seeing how these tools of astrology can start to create a language that can help to unpack what we're seeing. And so I'm super excited that we can kind of play and experiment with this and for you to have your background of over 30 years of experience within astrology. And, you know, I started in 2009 doing interviews at the Northwest Astrological Conference and, you know, about a decade, probably recorded around 250, maybe 300 interviews with some of the top astrologers in the world. So I've got a lot of unpublished interviews about astrology, but it's really helped inform my own ideas as I'm starting to apply it here. But of course, just really grateful for the time that we have. I don't know how long we have on this planet. We could all get hit by a bus tomorrow. I mean, it's like really no guarantee for life. But yeah, I agree that there's a certain attention towards prioritizing what's important to me, to us. And I think doing a project like this of just immersing ourselves into the stories of others, to bear witness to their stories, and to really honor what we've seen and to tell the story of what we've seen. And that's a topic that we'll be getting into. And I look forward to going on this journey with you of helping to do justice to these 36 projects that we're able to see at Sundance 2024. And I'm really looking forward to it. Me too.

[01:10:27.251] Wonder Bright: I'm really excited to start this extremely long conversation. that we'll be having over the next few days. And I hope that it's of value to people listening to us. And the good news is I finally figured out how to get the email situation working on our website. So if you're inspired or interested in what we're talking about, I would invite you to sign up for our newsletter. Our goal is hopefully, my health permitting, that we would be able to release more podcasts talking about story and astrology and unpacking these signatures in new and emerging media, but also in some of our old favorites. And we'd really like to engage in a dialogue with people about that. So if you're interested in that, then please sign up for our newsletter on StoryAllTheWayDown.com and we will keep you posted as we go forward.

[01:11:27.407] Kent Bye: And we will also try to keep updated as much as we can for films that have been picked up for distribution that you'll be able to see at some point. There are websites that are out there like justwatch.com and just googling you can search for if things have been picked up. Because the difficult thing is that sometimes the stories that we're talking about you may not get a chance to see. So we're going to try to do our best to talk about them in a way that's abstract. Maybe you can listen to the first part but then we'll maybe get into spoilers. Or maybe you're just the type of person that would prefer to have your own experience with the film and then listen to something. That's more like me. I would much rather see something on its own and then listen to something afterwards to help unpack it. And that's kind of what we're trying to do is create a complement to these stories and to, in some ways, archive them and to talk about them, but also to do a lot of research and development for even how we're thinking about it and talking about it, our own production processes for how we're even producing this season. We've learned a lot last year. We're going to be taking those lessons and applying it this year and then we'll be applying whatever we learned to this season and hopefully, fingers crossed, we'll be able to do some more seasons and take some feedback for what other themes you might want to hear and we'll try to make the films more broadly available that you can watch them in either streaming services or video on demand so that you can go on this journey along with us after we've sharpened our teeth a little bit when it comes to understanding how to talk about these stories in this way. I'm excited for where that goes. I know Wonders has been thinking a lot about the future seasons and topics, and so we have plenty of ideas for where this could go. But if we really want to make a go of this, of doing it more, we'd love to have audiences and participation and newsletter, maybe even a Patreon at some point to get people more involved and to help sustain this idea to explore this intersection between the archetypal language of astrology and the dynamics of story.

[01:13:17.955] Wonder Bright: Yeah, so go to Story all the way down, sign up for our newsletter, and we hope to be in dialogue with you more soon. Yeah, and thanks for listening. Thank you.

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#31: Season 2 Kickoff: Sundance 2024 Documentary Archetypal Themes