Eight wise men
University janitors opine on life in Patrick Shen’s ‘Philosopher Kings’
By Carl Kozlowski 05/20/2010
It’s easy to assume that society’s often most underappreciated workers — people like janitors, fry cooks, garbage collectors and security guards — don’t have much to say about life. But Pasadena-based filmmaker Patrick Shen learned that those assumptions couldn’t be more off-base when he created his new feature-length documentary “The Philosopher Kings” — detailing the stories of several such men who, in fact, possess tremendously thoughtful reflections on life and the world we inhabit.
Shen’s “Kings” follows the tales of eight university custodians discussing what they’ve learned from their diverse and difficult life experiences. One of the men, Luis Cardenas, is a Caltech custodian who explains how he learned to live without his right arm after being struck by a drunk driver. That kind of stark reality shows that Shen had far deeper motivations than Matt Damon’s titular genius-janitor character in the 1997 classic “Good Will Hunting.”
“It wasn’t ‘Good Will Hunting,’ but it was a culmination of several things. I’d read Plato in high school and loved the concept of philosopher kings, in which the deepest thinkers get to rule society, and carried it with me for many years,” explains Shen. “I was interviewing a professor for my last film, ‘Flight from Death,’ about death anxiety and how it affects our behaviors. The professor said he was often mistaken for being homeless because of his look. He said I should talk to janitors because I’d get a better insight into the human condition, so that’s when I put two and two together and the light bulb went off.”
Shen approached universities nationwide for profile subject recommendations, hoping to establish a broad geographic diversity rather than concentrating on one or two big cities. Once he and his staff assembled a pool of candidates, they conducted pre-screening interviews and ultimately selected eight people “who had amazing stories and could articulate them.”
The furthest Shen intended to travel from California for an interview was Princeton University in New Jersey. But once there, the custodian he profiled had such a compelling story that Shen opted to take him on a visit to his homeland of Haiti.
“We found out a Haitian gentleman we were profiling had provided funds for a water project in his native village out of his own pocket,” recalls Shen. “He established the construction of a simple water project for his whole village, and then we traveled back with him to see the construction results there.”
Another moving segment of “Kings” depicts the life of a Vietnam vet who had been shot in the back, and, says Shen, “crawled through the jungle for three days before passing out and being paralyzed from the waist down, and then fighting back in therapy to walk again.” Even more amazingly, the veteran re-enlisted to go back to Vietnam six months later and eventually saved another soldier’s life.
Yet the story of Caltech’s Cardenas has plenty to help it stand out as well. Cardenas had not only lost his arm but was knocked into a coma for more than two weeks when a drunk driver hit him — all while his wife was pregnant with their third child. Not only did Cardenas recover enough to keep working, he ultimately forgave the drunk driver and didn’t press charges when he learned the other man had five kids to care for himself.
“They are humble guys but with extraordinary things to say if you take the time to hear them out,” says Shen. “All of them were ordinary as far as their educations and concerns, but the insight they had into their experiences and life in general were extraordinary. They had gone through what many might call ordinary hardships but have beautiful elegant ways of reconciling with the suffering they had.”
“The Philosopher Kings” is playing May 21-27
at the Downtown Independent Theater, 251 S. Main St., Los Angeles. Tickets are $10. Call (213) 617-1033 or visit downtownindependent.com.
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