A Look Back at Sacred Music Festival

Nine days. Sixty venues. Eighty-five events. Two thousand artists.

Everything came together for the World Festival of Sacred Music--the Americas, a multicultural event celebrated in 1999 in response to a global message by the Dalai Lama, who invited countries to use music as a means of ushering in a peaceful millennium.

A two-hour documentary airing tonight at 9 on KCET-TV highlights many of the performances recorded by CatchLight Films, which captured the sights and sounds at venues both large and small in Los Angeles. (See review, F24.)

Judy Mitoma of the UCLA Center for Intercultural Performance is executive producer of the program, which follows performers who appeared at the Hollywood Bowl, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the John Anson Ford Amphitheater, UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall, the First AME Church and at the water’s edge on Ocean Park Boulevard in Santa Monica.

At the time, the festival’s managing director Sara Wolf told The Times: “We brought together a unique coalition of artists, environmental, faith-based and cultural groups and generated tremendous goodwill.”