Sacred Seeds

The Series

Sacred Seeds is a docuseries that seeks answers to some of the most urgent questions of today by investigating the traditions and practices of Indigenous communities. Join us as we travel the globe, breaking bread with the elders, experiencing joy, and bridging ancient wisdom with the modern world.

Sacred Seeds explores the idea that healing, for us as individuals and for the entire planet, may be found in the values and practices of Indigenous communities. For millennia, these ancestral peoples have stewarded the land, found joy, and lived for the benefit of all species and future generations. Indigenous knowledge is founded in the collective rather than the individual, in connection rather than isolation, and in protection over exploitation. These are the common denominators of change and hope that Sacred Seeds will explore in each episode and each Indigenous community.

Who We'll Feature

Click on a location pin to see more info on each Indigenous community.

"We are born of the same womb, tied in the bonds of humanity, tied to the heavens above, tied to the earth below. These are bonds that can never be severed, from this life to the next, we are but one family."

– Maori prayer

Director's Statement

For as long as memory serves, the pursuit of preserving Indigenous wisdom has softly called out to my spirit, as if echoing from the distant realms of another lifetime. My first conscious exposure to Indigenous ways of life was in high school, through the pages of The Forest People, which was anthropologist Colin M. Turnbull’s chronicle of his experiences with the Mbuti pygmies—a hunter-gatherer society dwelling in the Ituri Forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo. This enthralling introduction to ethnography stirred my soul, propelling me to embark on a journey that led to the synthesis of my passions for visual anthropology and spirituality, culminating in a dual BA/MA degree in East-West Philosophy and Documentary Filmmaking at Boston University. My thesis film was an ethnographic study of two lay practitioners living across the Charles River at the Cambridge Zen Center, where I later ended up “going native” and residing for two years, actively engaging in Korean Kwan Um Zen meditation practice.

During my career thus far, I’ve had the privilege of working in a variety of
production roles on projects exploring cultures worldwide, from Colombia to Haiti to Nepal. I've also engaged in both independent documentaries and broadcast doc series addressing social justice issues. Immersed in BIPOC communities for the past 15 years and ever cognizant of the dangers of a voyeuristic “white gaze,” I've absorbed critical insights into the importance of authentic storytelling and am fully committed to presenting a nuanced and multifaceted portrayal of Indigenous communities. As a first-generation Asian-American woman with refugee parents from Vietnam, I recognize the potential limitations in telling these Indigenous communities' stories...

... And yet, I remain a perpetual student of life, seeking fresh perspectives to authentically portray truths. During a summer of study at a Taiwanese monastery in 2005, the Buddhist name “Zixin” was bestowed upon me. The term “Zixin” comes from a designated Zen Buddhist surname, “Zi,” and the Mandarin word “xin,” the meaning of which encompasses both “heart” and “mind.” The ancient Chinese understood that, by combining these two meanings with this one word, the distinction we tend to draw between our emotional and mental worlds is only an imposed dichotomy. Reality is the place where subjective and objective truth meet, where “absolute truth” exists only in the relationship between subject and object.

In documentary film, this union is where the authenticity of a story can be expressed, through the relationship between the filmmakers, the participants, and the audience. This is the reality with which I strive to represent in my work, striking a balance between passion and education, art and information, film and journalism. It is within this paradigm that I approach the making of this film series in particular, keeping in both mind and heart that to represent the reality experienced by each Indigenous individual in collaboration with the film crew accurately, it’s imperative that each film be implicitly self-aware while at the same time conveying the pace, feeling, and vision with which each Indigenous group experiences the world.

~Xuân Vũ, SACRED SEEDS’ Series Director

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