POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE OF HOPE

Hope's Underbelly begins from the acknowledgement that hope is not a neutral or universally redemptive force. It is a charged terrain rarely examined in its fullness. In a culture that worships the hero, to speak of hope's shadow is to risk being seen as irresolute, faithless, or ungrateful. But for those who have lived long enough inside hope to encounter its underbelly—loving what could not be saved, believing past what was survivable—hope eventually demands a reckoning. Hope's Underbelly is that reckoning. An unscripted conversation film, it continues a lived inquiry I first articulated through music, after my own descent into the underworld of hopelessness. Public figures, artists, healers, and culture-makers were invited to sit on camera and revisit moments when life brought them into direct confrontation with the duality of hope—devotion and disillusionment, rescue and rage, faith and denial, and bear witness to the journey of their own returns. These conversations were not designed to arrive at conclusions, but to hold with reverence the complexity of how we define and relate to the vast spectrum of hope. Filmed in a single day, the exchanges were not unified by agreement, but by a shared willingness to fearlessly narrate the cost of hope. Each interview—live and uncharted—was an invocation to truth-telling. Participants returned to moments where hope frayed, complicated, or reconfigured their lives—offering silences that lingered, gestures suspended mid-thought, tears that thickened, bodies that hesitated and then relented, and laughter too. What emerged was not inspiration, morality, or instruction. It was unfiltered testimony that moved past the polished narratives we tell about hope and into the undefended truth of what it means to meet the edge of hopelessness and return altered. The film does not displace the power of hope. It displaces the tyranny of its singularity. For anyone wrestling with their own threshold, the film offers solidarity and a reminder that survival sometimes relies on being witnessed—and witnessing is a collective art. This is storytelling restoring ritual testimony to the public square. An altar not to survival's triumph, but to its cost—and to the possibility that naming that cost honestly is itself a form of care, and the true work of the hero.