Ask Akira Chan how many times he has watched Pillars of Power, and the number is wild: up to a thousand, across every cut and every version. Enough times that the cast stopped staying on the screen and started following him into his dreams. “You end up just living and breathing it,” he said. “Living, breathing, thinking about it, dreaming about it, for the whole time you’re working on it.”
That kind of immersion is just how Akira works. He has spent close to two decades in documentary film, running Rare Media with his wife, Renee, mostly in the same orbit: thought leadership, health, wellness, consciousness, nature, spirituality. He calls it his “living education,” the kind of arc where a deepening meditation practice turns into meditation DVDs, and a fascination with mysticism eventually lands a mystic project on his desk. So when Pillars of Power showed up, he didn’t need much convincing. The title alone hooked him. Then he saw the footage, and it clicked: new faces, new voices, but exactly the kind of material he’d spent his career learning how to shape.
Being Handed a Baby
By the time the footage reached Akira, the directors and the rest of the film team had already poured months of work into it. He compares what happened next to being handed a baby. “It’s almost like being handed a baby,” he said. “Here, take care of this, get it out of diapers so we can put it out into the world.”
That is a cute way of describing an editing job that involved hundreds of hours of footage and one very small window to fit into a theatrical runtime. Akira puts the ratio somewhere around ten minutes of footage for every one minute that survives the final cut, sometimes worse. Pillars of Power had enough voices and material to fill ten hours easily. “It could have been a ten-hour film,” he said. “But it can’t be a ten-hour film.” Somewhere in there was a ninety-minute movie, and finding it meant walking away from a lot of footage he clearly loved.
Getting through that kind of heartbreak, Akira says, comes down to staying a little detached. He usually directs and edits his own projects, which he says makes it easy to get overly attached to every moment captured on camera. This time, he had structure to lean on: the film’s five pillars gave him a shape to build around, and from there, it came down to instinct, keeping whatever felt most meaningful and cutting the rest. What he calls the result, a “tapestry of voices,” is his way of saying that everyone got a piece of the film, even if nobody got all of their footage in it.
There is also an Easter egg for anyone who stays through the credits. Every cast member was asked, on camera, what they would pick as a sixth pillar beyond the five in the film. Those answers made the final cut as a bonus scene rolling under everyone’s names. Akira is staying tight-lipped about who said what. “I’m just gonna… no spoiler alerts,” he said, laughing. He will only confirm that the reactions in early screenings have been big laughs.
Where the Story Gets Grounded
Some scenes in Pillars of Power are built to be hard to sit through, and Akira thinks that’s exactly the point. The film leans into uplifting, reflective stories, but it also makes room for grief, loss, and heartbreak. “Those are powerful because it creates a really nice balance between things,” he said.
That instinct didn’t come from nowhere. Before Pillars of Power, several of the projects Akira worked on lived almost entirely in that harder territory: addiction, recovery, healing, grief. One was a deeply personal film a friend of his made about losing his brother. Those projects taught him that the heavier stories are often what “ground the viewer in the human experience,” and that once an audience feels grounded, the beautiful parts of a story land even harder.
Try to pin him down on which moments hit hardest, though, and he’ll tell you straight away that he’s the wrong person to ask for details. “I’m one of those people that can’t remember jokes or things like that,” he said. “I’m more of a feeler.” What he can tell you is that roughly ten segments in the film reliably get him, even now, after nearly a thousand viewings. There were tears in the editing room, and he treats that as a normal cost of working on something like this. “You’re gonna feel and experience a lot,” he said. “I myself was transformed working on it.”
Two moments in particular still land for him on repeat: a reflection on relationship and loss, and someone’s account of rebuilding themselves from the ground up after something deeply embarrassing. He doesn’t overthink naming the feeling either. “That really lands,” he said, “because that is so true.”
An Oasis in the Noise
Akira has spent years working in what he calls conscious media, not because it’s trendy, but because he believes how a piece of content makes you feel matters as much as what it teaches you. With Pillars of Power, he thinks the film carries an energy of its own, built to push back against the noise. “I feel like this film really has an energy to it,” he said. “If it leaves you feeling better and more expanded, that’s the whole point.”
He describes the film as an oasis, a break from being told constantly what to think and where to put your attention. Partway through explaining that, he got interrupted mid-thought by his own dog, a fittingly unscripted moment for someone who has spent this entire conversation insisting the film’s power lives in how it feels rather than how polished it sounds. He recovered without missing a beat: “There are a few dog scenes in there too, for the dog lovers.”
Dog cameo aside, that’s basically his pitch for the film. An hour and a half with Pillars of Power, he says, works more like a meditation than a typical movie night. “You’re going to feel good,” he said. “You’re going to get a little boost. You’re going to learn a few things. And to me, that’s the real power of this movie.”
When Finishing Is the First Step
After months of living inside the footage, making the hard calls about what stayed and what didn’t, Akira finally got to hand Pillars of Power over to the people it was made for. He doesn’t think of that moment as the finish line. “Finishing a film and completing it, that’s really the first step,” he said. “It seems like it’s the last step, but it really is the first step, because what happens next is everyone else gets to experience it.”
By the end of the conversation, his hosts were ready to declare the win official, telling him he’d “knocked it out of the park.” Akira, typically, just laughed it off and said thanks.
About Akira Chan
Akira Chan is a filmmaker and editor who has worked in documentary film for close to two decades. He runs Rare Media with his wife, Renee, where their work moves through thought leadership, health, wellness, consciousness, nature, and spirituality. On Pillars of Power: The Hidden Secret Behind Achieving Greatness, Akira edited hundreds of hours of interviews down into the finished film. For more information: raremedia.tv
About Pillars of Power
Pillars of Power: The Hidden Secret Behind Achieving Greatness is built around five pillars, bringing together a wide range of voices and personal reflections into what Akira calls a tapestry. The film balances uplifting moments with honest stories of grief, loss, heartbreak, and recovery, aiming to leave audiences feeling, in Akira’s words, “better and more expanded.” For more information: thepillarsofpower.com
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