The Love Project

WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?

We label love erotic, filial, platonic, paternal, maternal and true. Romantic love, young love, tough love; lust, jealousy and attachment. Shakespeare proclaimed: “Love is the most beautiful of dreams and the worst of nightmares.” We beg, steal and cheat for love. We act in the name of love, create, grieve, cherish and chase love.

What is love? Is love simply an uncontrollable, often maddening emotion elicited by a neurochemical reaction? Or is love a sacred force—the very essence of our being?

Defined, love disappears. Quantified, it diminishes. A force beyond structure and concept, love needs no explanation, even while it begs for understanding. In this unique and fearless documentary, The Love Project explores the power, paradox and potential of love in relation to the human spirit, community and the evolution of humanity.

EVERYMAN’S JOURNEY

Bracketed within the framework of filmmaker Scot Swordy’s own journey, The Love Project encourages the viewer to explore and expand his or her personal experience of love—to dismantle the customs and conditioning we allow to confine love in order to discover love’s incomparable and individual potential within our own lives.

As the film’s creator and director, Scot Swordy’s odyssey began with the desire to understand humanity in relation to the pervasive and disappointing lack of integrity and vitality he witnessed all around him at both an institutional and community level. Leaving his London-suburb home at the age of sixteen, Swordy’s  twelve year pilgrimage led him across continents—in search of answers. From a global perspective to local experience, Swordy consistently found the same malady of spirit, until disheartened, he turned his search inward and discovered that the pain and corruption he perceived in the world directly mirrored the fear and poverty present in his own heart.

Confronting the challenging and uncomfortable truths of his inner world, Swordy began the process of dismantling the conditioning that governed his experience of life and love. Replacing intention with attention, Swordy traded the culturally adopted notion of love that consistently failed him, for the fragile, dormant—uniquely personal—expression that belonged solely to him.

Astounded by the transformative power of honoring his own authentic love—it’s effect on his interpersonal relationships as well as his experience of the world at large—Swordy conceived of The Love Project as a means to galvanize a global transformation, inspiring viewers to cast off convention and consider their own intrinsic love.

REVIVING PLATO’S SYMPOSIUM

In a nod to Plato’s symposium, considered one of the most influential and important treatments of love in all of western literature, the film presents perspectives without attempting to propose answers or definitions. A syllabus of diverse viewpoints, The Love Project seeks to stimulate introspection, refocus attention from the external to the personal and inspirit a vital global dialog.

A mysterious and elusive force, man’s attempts to understand and harness love predominate the collective canon of art, literature, philosophy, science, theology, and even commerce. In a montage of interviews ostensibly gathered as part of Swordy’s own search for insight and illumination, The Love Project broadens the traditional discussion of love between people, to investigate the consequences of expanding love into every aspect of our lives.

Imbuing with equal authority the opinions and perspectives of best-selling authors and sex workers, spiritual gurus and convicts, artists, activists, scientists and corporate leaders, the magic of the film lies in the opportunity it offers each viewer to look inward and decide for their own lives what resonates as useful and true.

LIVING LOVE

Fluid and alive, love inherently waxes and wanes, evolving as it shapes, transforms and teaches us. As the prelude to an ongoing, living relationship, The Love Project extends to every viewer the opportunity to create a self-guided curriculum as part of an interactive, multidimensional experience.

Taking advantage of today’s social software network phenomena and the new age of media, each excerpted interview may be downloaded and viewed in full from The Love Project website, affording viewers the ability to explore at more length particular ideas and personalities. As part of a growing library, these Love Volumes give the project a breadth and depth impossible to achieve in a single production.

We present the love project, an interactive journey into love!