PACIFICA FILM FESTIVAL
"Where Film Meets the Soul of the World"
September 8-11, 2016
Mission & Vision
The Pacifica Film Festival seeks to feature highly curated films that explore the powerful and unique symbolic themes and soulful stories enhanced by the roles of mythology, archetypes, symbology, and depth psychology in film. This signature event aims to create an exciting, dynamic and diverse community of Pacifica alumni, scholars of depth psychology and mythology, those already passionately involved in the field of film, and everyone who is interested finding symbolic, archetypal as depth psychological perspectives in film.
Organizers
The Pacifica Film Festival is produced by the Pacifica Graduate Institute Alumni Association (PGIAA) that supports both the alumni of Pacifica Graduate Institute and the wider community in pursuit of developing their intellectual, spiritual, altruistic, and professional capabilities. The Institute is a 501c3 non profit organization which supports an educational environment that nourishes creative learning and research, respect for cultural diversity and individual differences, and an academic community that fosters “a spirit of free and open inquiry.” The mission of Pacifica Graduate Institute is focused on “tending the soul of the world.”
"Pacifica is a Mission with an Institute. The mission, "anima mundi collende gratia," (tending the soul of and in the world) has inspired a literal host of others far and wide-those who now carry the fire of the vision itself. The intensity of that calling is the seed impulse carried within the dreams of many. When cultivated, this soul spark, rooted in the animated presence of the deep psyche, opens to personal fulfillment and a more just and fertile planet. In an increasingly complex world, the scholarship and service of Pacifica's faculty, staff, alumni, and students offers a soul centered "intelligence" integral to what is being asked of us now."
-- Stephen Aizenstat, Ph.D., Chancellor, Founding President James Hillman, Ph.D., discusses Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2010
About Depth Psychology
The term "depth psychology" was coined at the turn of the twentieth century by Eugen Bleuler, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Zürich and director (1898-1927) of the Burghölzli Asylum in Zürich, where C. G. Jung began his career as a psychiatrist. It has become used by Freudians and Jungians to indicate those psychologies that orient themselves around the idea of the "unconscious."
Initially the unconscious was conceived in structural terms with much attention to the content, especially symbolic meanings; in the contemporary world this notion has been expanded to include the study of processes which operate outside conscious awareness. In general these psychologies see the human being as often divided against him or herself, with some thoughts, feelings, wishes, and memories accessible to awareness, and others hidden beneath the surface.
By focusing on the unconscious, C. G.Jung, Sigmund Freud, and their followers worked to chart and delineate what lies outside of conscious awareness, and to illumine the dynamics between consciousness and what is extruded or not admitted to it, including collective aspects with cultural and archetypal dimensions.
Through the study of dreams, images, symptoms, slips of the tongue, spontaneous humor, meaningful coincidences as well as interpersonal engagements, depth psychologists attempt to understand the language and the dynamics of the unconscious as it manifests in their work with clients and in the world.