This year, as part of its twentieth anniversary festivities, Cinequest will be bestowing one of its rare Life of a Maverick Awards on Deepak Chopra. Cinequest Director and Co-Founder Halfdan Hussey sat down to explain a little of the process behind choosing Chopra.

The Life of a Maverick Award, Hussey explains, “is about people whose lives touch upon film, they do film in some way, or a film has been made about them. The way they’ve lived really epitomizes the maverick spirit, which for us is innovation, originality, doing things that are provocative, thinking — to use the cliche — outside the box, that kind of spirit. So, pushing boundaries.”
Since this year’s festival is a significant anniversary, choosing an interesting recipient was a must. “This year, for the twentieth anniversary, we were thinking, who would be somebody who would really really sum up the maverick spirit in a way that would excite us, our tradition, and really get people thinking and feeling and talking and discussing, provoke them?”
Chopra has, in recent years, gotten involved in film, working with his family to bring a comic book series to the big screen and writing other screenplays as well. “The main reason [we chose] Deepak is that we feel at Cinequest that art has transformative power. One of the reasons we do film and we want to bring forward maverick cinema is we feel it can change people. … Deepak Chopra’s life is about transformation to us.” Hussey went on to talk about Chopra’s busy, complex life, which has included a stint as the head of a hospital here in the US. The stress of his position drove him to heavy drinking and smoking, and his resulting poor health spurred his interest in holistic medicine. For more on Chopra’s life and to buy tickets for his appearance at the festival, see www.cinequest.org.
While Chopra is best known for his holistic and spiritual writing, Hussey sees him as a thought-provoking figure for the arts as well. “What it has to do with art, to me, and what the focus of his conversation here is going to be, is Joseph Campbell said the new priests will be the artists. The old priests, it doesn’t work quite as well because the old religions and rituals have kind of lost their energy in some ways, so now the artists have to come in and provide these transformative, epiphanic moments for people. We think he’s a really great person to talk about that power that film or writing has on individuals, and to go on to some topics that are, even within our office, highly controversial. … To discuss concepts of energy in art: is it real or is it not? If you have violence in a movie, does it create an energy of violence, or is it more of a catharsis? There are these very interesting, provocative topics we can bring in with somebody whose life is really about transformations, mind-body connections, energy work, spiritual consciousness, and consciousness.”
“That’s the reason for [us choosing] Deepak Chopra, those topics of transformation, consciousness and art, responsibility of artists or nonresponsibility of artists to their audience, and their community, and their society. We’re not, at Cinequest, here to say we have a particular belief in this stuff, but to open up the conversations.”
Chopra will be presented with the award at an event at the California Theater on Tuesday, March 2, at 7pm. See www.cinequest.org for tickets and details.