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“I would get wounds that went through to the bones. The bone would weaken and break off. That was a while back. I’ve had leprosy for over 22 years. No matter what people think, I am still embarrassed.” So recounts a Nepalese washer woman, one of eight lepers interviewed in Ellen Bruno’s Skin and Bones.

Many of us think we’re inured to shock. But that’s only because our basic precepts are so rarely challenged. In looking at different experiences with sickness, aging, and death, Skin and Bones will surely do just that. This video triptych will comprise three half-hour segments: on a leper colony; on the Tibetan ritual of ‘sky burial,’ in which the body is cut up and carried away by birds; and on a yet-to-be determined topic, possibly cosmetic surgery in America.

“Particularly in the West, we’re so resistant to our changing selves and our mortality, it governs many of the things we do in our lives,” says the San Francisco-based videomaker. “In each of these pieces, I want to rattle the viewer into re-examining the white knuckle of mortality.”

For three decades now, Bruno has been having close encounters with other cultures and ways of thinking, first as an international relief worker and then as a documentarian. It all started in high school, when the young Bruno accompanied a nun from her school to a Mayan village deep in the Yucatan. “At that point, it became clear to me what my calling was.”

Bruno set out for Cambodia immediately after college. Joining the International Rescue Committee, she hunted for families of children who had been separated or orphaned in their flight from the Khmer Rouge. Upon returning to the United States, she encountered many of these refugees in the worst neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the Bronx — living without heat, hunting for food in garbage cans, suffering from real and psychosomatic illnesses, and talking about possession by spirits. The New York doctors, trained in medicine but not the spirit world, could provide only limited help.

Bruno bridged the cultural gap. “We got the midwives, monks, shamans, and herbalists together and we’d drag them up to the Bronx to do grand rounds with the doctors,” she says. “We ended up having this traveling circus of sorts, which became very impractical.” Bruno’s solution was to make a video on Cambodian health care, called House of the Spirit. It was a crude start, she admits. “Talking heads, cutaway, talking heads, cutaway. Bad sound, bad narration,” she says with a laugh. But it was effective. “Despite all of its imperfections, the content was there and people really responded. It was heavily used.”

That spurred her transition into filmmaking. After getting a Masters in documentary film at Stanford University in California, Bruno spent the ’90s turning out half a dozen documentaries on human rights struggles. Among her subjects were Cambodians’ struggle to rebuild a shattered society in Samsara (1990), the resistance of Tibetan Buddhist nuns to the Chinese occupation in Satya (1993), and Burmese teenagers forced into prostitution in Sacrifice (1998).

Her rudimentary technique has evolved into one of the most subtle, graceful, and meditative styles among documentary makers today. Making use of lyrical voiceover, slow motion, and the telling detail — a lipsticked adolescent dancing, lepers weaving — Bruno transforms the way documentary is defined. “A lot of documentaries are too wrapped up in information and stay in the realm of the mind,” she notes. “I’m motivated when something really touches my heart and gets me deep in my bones.”

In Bruno’s films, political situations are revealed by showing “what is the reality of those people who are putting one foot in front of the other and trying to lead their lives.” Like her work with the doctors, Bruno’s videos bridge vast cultural chasms, offering profound lessons in shared humanity.

“Each time I work on something, it becomes a major teaching for me,” says the 45-year-old artist. “I’ve been very fortunate in that way, like I’ve been sitting at the feet of great masters. Between the young nuns, the sex workers, and the lepers, I can’t imagine any greater teachers.”

Download the Weekend Workshop Agenda (.pdf)