Tribe of Heart films and videos are now all available in Czech, along with five other languages on our Global Tribal Cinema web site
 

 

More than 500 students attend a screening of The Witness in the Czech Republic

Community educators have taken Tribe of Heart films to school audiences around the Czzech Republic and Slovakia

Action Opportunities

1. People-powered Distribution: Reach out to those you know internationally, providing links to our films and videos which are now available for free online viewing in Czech, English, French, German, Portugues and Spanish. Your efforts to raise awareness of Tribe of Heart's documentaries and educational resources will help plant the seeds of justice, compassion, and holistic non-violence throughout the world!

2. Translation: If you are a professional translator motivated to help translate and distribute our films in more languages, please contact us.

3. Support: Tribe of Heart's award-winning films and educational programs are entirely funded by a community of supporters across the world who believe in our work. Their generosity, and yours, will continue to allow us to offer life-changing films online at no cost to viewers, through our new international, commercial-free viewing platform, Global Tribal Cinema. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to Tribe of Heart today, which will help us complete our new film, LEGACY, and expand the languages and cultures reached by our current offerings. We can't do this without you. Join us!

View & share the film online now


View & share the film online now

A culmination of years of collaboration with volunteer and supporter Jan Cejka

Tribe of Heart is pleased to announce that our web site and all our video offerings, including our feature films The Witness and Peaceable Kingdom: The Journey Home, are now online for free viewing worldwide in the Czech language.

Photo by Italia Millán

This is the first of several new language versions of our Global Tribal Cinema (GTC) to be released in 2018, with more coming soon!

The Czech GTC launch is a tribute to the hard work and dedication of one person, Jan Cejka, who has been volunteering with Tribe of Heart since the early 2000's to help bring our films to audiences in the Czech Republic. Jan has facilitated film festival screenings, community showings, outreach to students, and collaboration with activists, resulting in many thousands of people viewing Tribe of Heart's films in his native country.

Despite struggling with health challenges in recent years, Jan committed himself to meticulously translating 226 minutes of film and video subtitles along with approximately 3,300 words of web site text in order to complete the Czech GTC. We are so grateful for his generous contribution of time, creativity, and expertise to this project!  

With each new language that we add to our Global Tribal Cinema, we go to great lengths to ensure that the educational experience is 100% faithful to the message of our films, and equally important, respectful of the language and culture of its new audience. Skillfully addressing sensitive issues of injustice and cultivating compassion across cultures cannot be done by rote. For our translators and auditors, it takes personal understanding of the message, a high level of competence in two different languages, and artful creativity to make the translated work feel natural and engaging for the audience.  

In Jan, we have found a collaborative partner who fulfills all these demanding requirements, and whose accomplishments as a lifetime activist inspire our entire team. It is a fantastic feeling to release this new version of the GTC with complete confidence in the translation work that has been done, including that of describing Holistic Nonviolence, the new path we are developing for personal transformation and social evolution.    

For Jan, this ambitious project was just his latest effort in over 25 years of volunteer work devoted to serving peace, nonviolence, animal rights, and other justice causes. What follows is a brief sampling of some of Jan's contributions to advocacy over the years, which have had a major impact on the animal movement in Michigan, where he currently resides, and in his home country of the Czech Republic. Jan's longterm commitment to making the world a better place is living proof that one person's change of heart can indeed change the world.   

Photo by Italia Millán

Jan Cejka's Quarter Century Journey of Awakening Compassion and Empowering Justice

 

In 1991, Jan started volunteering for the Michigan Humane Society (MHS), his state's largest companion animal rescue organization. Working closely with the animals opened his eyes to the suffering and injustice they endure. For the first time in his life he was able to clearly see the animals as sentient, feeling individuals with thoughts, desires and needs which gave them the capacity to both enjoy life and experience pain, as well as have relationships and bonds with members of their own and other species.   

With the encouragement of several volunteers at the MHS, Jan joined a small local group of young activists who organized frequent demonstrations, focused mainly on circuses and the fur trade. It was around this time that he stopped eating meat, eventually becoming a vegan.  

Wanting to do more, Jan began reaching out to customers at health food stores and local fairs with leaflets describing the plight of animals caught up in the food industry. As the pressing need for educational tools became clear to him, Jan created new brochures about farmed animals, which he printed in large quantities and offered to students on college campuses in suburban Detroit. He also set up tables inside academic buildings, displaying the brochures and other animal-related books and literature.  

Don and Italia with Jan

Jan would spend Friday evenings leafleting on the streets with two dedicated young activists, Italia Millán and Don Hughes, who say they are honored to call Jan a friend. "His passion and dedication for animals has inspired us -- and many others, I am sure -- to get more deeply involved in activism," said Italia, who also has a long history with Tribe of Heart. Her advice on wildlife advocacy issues and overseeing several translation projects, including the Spanish version of Global Tribal Cinema, have been true gifts to our organization. Italia continued, "For Jan, there is no standing still, and no challenge big enough to keep him from raising awareness and working to prevent animal suffering. He always feels he has not done enough, but to us he is and will always be a bright light for the animals."

On weekends, Jan took his message to customers at a local farmers' market. With a small group, he was soon collecting signatures on petitions against the shooting of mourning doves and the use of leg-hold traps in local parks and recreational areas.   

Eventually, Jan began organizing screenings of The Witness, and later, Peaceable Kingdom, at regional libraries, inspiring audience members to open their hearts and minds to the need to view and treat our fellow animals with true care and respect.  

For many years in Detroit, the municipal pound operated gas chambers. Having witnessed firsthand the horrific deaths of unadopted animals killed in this way, Jan was compelled to participate in hearings called by the Detroit City Council in 1999 and 2000, making his case for why the practice should be outlawed. He and a small group of volunteers collected hundreds of signatures from Detroit residents and presented the petitions to Council members. With the help of the Michigan Humane Society and others with influence, the use of gas chambers at the Detroit municipal pound was discontinued in October of 2003. While not an end to the unnecessary killing of companion animals, this was an important step in raising his community's awareness of the need for nonviolent, no-kill alternatives.  

In 2010, Jan came to the defense of Canadian geese being rounded up and killed in his region. He presented to the local Department of Natural Resources scientific evidence of the suffering and injustice endured by the geese. In 2014, the barbaric mass slaughter operation was finally discontinued on most of the Detroit-area lakes where it had been taking place.  

Next, he took it upon himself to educate the organizers of annual fishing contests on Detroit's suburban lakes, presenting them with recent studies demonstrating the sentience of fish. It is still his hope that these senseless contests, organized primarily for the "amusement" of children and so harmful to their moral development, will be abolished soon.   

This work of Jan's to stop the killing of wildlife particularly resonated with Tribe of Heart's co-founder Jenny Stein, whose very first public act as an animal advocate, more than 20 years ago, was taking a public stand against a woodchuck killing contest. Until at least one person in a community speaks out, many people do not even pause to consider whether such "traditions" can be ethically justified. Jan has played this role over and over again in his community, and along the way, has inspired many others to join him in this challenging work.   

Jan's activism in his community is a classic example of "thinking globally and acting locally." When it comes to advocating for those with no legal rights and often considered to have no social status at all, such work requires moral strength and incredible dedication. But while Jan was busy taking action in his local area, his moral imagination was all along inspiring him to "act globally" as well, by bringing the life-changing message of animal rights philosophy into the Czech Republic, where these ideas were still very new.   

He began by financially supporting a number national and international animal-protection organizations, including several in the Czech Republic. He then wrote a Czech language pamphlet describing the lives and suffering of farmed animals, printed thousands of copies, and helped personally distribute them to several of the most influential animal protection groups in the CR. He also sponsored the translation and publication in the Czech language of several books on animal rights themes for both adults and children. These efforts played a significant role in the rise of a widespread and unified animal protection movement in the Czech Republic.   

In 2006, Jan teamed up with fellow animal advocate Jaroslav Benc to translate The Witness into Czech. The following year, they facilitated its screening at the "Open Your Eyes" International Film Festival in Prague, where it won the award for Best Documentary. Jan was there to accept the award on Tribe of Heart's behalf, and also received his own award honoring him for all his work for the animals in the Czech Republic.  

Thanks to Jan's and Jaroslav's efforts, a group of activists who saw The Witness began holding additional screenings, including a technique that was groundbreaking for the time, holding spontaneous open air screenings on city streets at night, taking Eddie Lama's inspired FaunaVision methodology to a new generation in a new culture.   

In addition to translating the work of others, Jan authored and published two books of his own - "Theirs Is the Kingdom" (2005) and "Animals Are Our Brethren" (2010), collections of chapters taken from books written by world-famous humanists and religious thinkers. During this same era, he worked with young activists to translate Peaceable Kingdom: The Journey Home into Czech, sponsoring a large-scale screening of the film in Prague.  

Jan's work as an activist is testimony to the difference one person can make. Over the course of many years, he has directly confronted injustices with moral courage, passion and reasoned argument, and he has done all he could to pass on the best of his wisdom to younger activists while at the same time financially supporting many of their projects. In a time when so many news stories focus on the worst of human nature, Jan's life's work is testimony to the fact that there is tremendous potential for making things better all around us, and that the opportunities to make real change happen are both right in front of us and across the world. 

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