Speaker: Rick Ray
Imagine the eternal Sahara with its windswept mountains of orange-gold sand, labyrinths that are the medinas of Fez and Marrakech, colorful markets with their fruits, tapestries, and mint tea. There are merchants selling rug kilims and goatskin lamps, and artisans specializing in tile mosaics or brass metalwork, silk slippers, or fragrant spices. This is the Morocco that was, and is. This is the land of the Kasbahs, the ancient desert palaces and forts of legend. This is also a land of high-tech mosques with laser beams that point toward Mecca. Filmmaker Rick Ray takes us on an unforgettable journey through a country that seems both untouched by time and yet is gradually moving through it.
Rick Ray is a vagabond raconteur and talented filmmaker who has visited areas usually closed to Western journalists and camera crews. He has met headhunters in Borneo, lived in a Buddhist monastery, given piano lessons in Bora Bora, ridden the rails in New Zealand, and drunk cod liver oil with Icelanders. Miraculously, during his adventures he has never once lost track of the progress of the Los Angeles Lakers. Rick is the founder of two stock footage companies, and currently teaches documentary filmmaking at the prestigious Brooks Institute in Ventura, California.