“Humanity Stoked” director Michael Ien Cohen gives a presentation to Lake Placid sixth graders Thursday, Oct. 26. The documentary is being shown at this year’s Lake Placid Film Festival. (News photo — Andy Flynn)

LAKE PLACID — Director Michael Ien Cohen’s “Humanity Stoked” — featured this week at the Lake Placid Film Festival — is much more than a skateboarding documentary; it is, as the poster describes, about “pushing through fear and moving humanity forward.”

“When you’re learning to skate, it’s mostly falling and getting hurt. And there’s a lot of lessons to be learned from being able to get back on the board and don’t let fear conquer you,” Cohen told sixth graders Thursday morning, sitting on the edge of the stage in the Lake Placid Middle/High School auditorium.

Cohen was a guest speaker for the Lake Placid Community School’s new “Learn from the PROS” series, aimed at exposing fourth and sixth graders to people with different professions.

Cohen is in town to promote his film, which is being screened at the Palace Theatre at 4:30 p.m. today and Saturday. Lake Placid is his latest stop on the film festival circuit in a quest to grab the attention of distributors who could buy the rights to show or stream the film.

Skateboarding — or “skating,” as Cohen calls it — is the hook to enter a bigger conversation about the challenges of moving humanity forward. With a cast of 70, he interviewed some of the world’s most iconic professional skaters, activists, scientists, artists, musicians and educators. Their common thread is the love of skateboarding, but they collectively explore the human emotion of fear — it’s roots and consequences as it relates to issues such as arts and sciences, human rights, LGBTQ rights, inequality, environmental issues and politics.

“Humanity Stoked” director Michael Ien Cohen looks at a slide from his film Thursday, Oct. 26 during a presentation to Lake Placid sixth graders. The documentary is being shown at this year’s Lake Placid Film Festival. (News photo — Andy Flynn)

“When I was a kid, people asked me if I wanted to be a pro skater. I didn’t even know what that was. I just wanted the world to make sense,” Cohen said in the film’s trailer.

Cohen, who is now 57, moved from New York to California when he was 10.

“I was very different from all the other kids in that town. My religion was different. My background was different,” he told the students. “And at 10 years old, that was the first time that I really experienced bigotry and racism.”

Others, including Mexican migrants, were also different, and he saw kids in school ostracize people because of those differences.

“I didn’t even understand it because where I grew up, everyone was the same. Everyone was equal,” he said. “I couldn’t wrap my head around why people were being so unkind to one another.”

“Humanity Stoked” director Michael Ien Cohen, left, talks to Lake Placid Film Festival organizer Gary Smith Thursday, Oct. 26 after a presentation to Lake Placid sixth graders. The documentary is being shown at this year’s Lake Placid Film Festival. (News photo — Andy Flynn)

Cohen’s love for skateboarding was sparked about 50 years ago, about the same time he found a passion for the performing arts. In a way, the two melded. He views skateboarding as a form of artistic expression.

“One of the most unique things about being human is our ability to be creative,” he said. “You can do so many different types of skating. The way you move your body on the board is a form of self expression, and that’s really, really important.”

While Cohen continued to skateboard throughout his life, he stopped acting at the age of 17, according to his IMDb biography. He decided to focus on school and work in the hotel industry – even after he decided at the age of 12 or 13 that he wanted to make films. That filmmaking passion was also put aside. Instead, he graduated from college and became an entrepreneur. He co-founded businesses to manufacture magnets for various industries. Then he co-founded a software company that pioneered web-based management systems for fire departments and EMS squads.

Yet something was missing. After three decades, he had a personal awakening and decided to finally make a movie.

“I spent the first three decades — 30 years — as an adult working in a job that provided me with no joy and no satisfaction because I let my fear stop me from really trying,” Cohen said.

Everyone is afraid of failure, he told the students. That’s natural.

“But the bigger fear that I want you to think about is the fear of uncertainty, because that’s what held me back in life,” he said. “The worst possible thing you can do to yourself — this age and moving forward — is to care too much about what other people think of you and what you do with your life. … That fear, that group-think mentality, it doesn’t just stop you from doing what you want to do, it stops you from even realizing what you may want to do. You have to simply not care about being embarrassed.”

Most of his life, Cohen focused on the things he didn’t know — that fear of uncertainty. So he never followed through on the urge to make films … until he was 50.

“I would tell myself, ‘I can’t do that. I don’t know how to do that.’ I don’t even know any filmmakers,'” he said, adding later that fear derailed his professional life for 30 years and held him in a place in his career that he didn’t really want to be.

Cohen never went to film school. He never even read a book on filmmaking. But he took the plunge anyway.

“Baby steps, one step at a time,” he said. “It’s amazing. You can walk 3,000 miles clear across the country to California, but it all has to be done one step at a time.”

Cohen bought a used camera. Then he found a friend who could show him how to use the camera. And he bought a plane ticket to Cuba to start filming.

“At the end of that first day where I was filming … I did feel a sense of pride,” he said. “And I also felt a realization about stupidity and how dumb I had been. … For 30 years, I wanted to do this and I didn’t do it. And this wasn’t horrible. This was wonderful.”

Not only did Cohen not have a filmmaking education, he had no money to make “Humanity Stoked.” He relied on a team of volunteers and paid for his own travel. It was a shoestring budget, to say the least, and that’s not the typical way to make a film. Most people spend a lot of time raising a lot of money before they get started.

It’s this outside-the-box approach to making “Humanity Stoked” that Cohen wanted Lake Placid’s sixth graders to take away from their meeting.

“Get really creative about a way to achieve something,” he said. “How am I going to get a team of people to make a movie with me when I don’t have any money to pay them? I also felt a sense of pride about that. Being able to figure out a way to make something happen in an untraditional way.”

No matter what they do in life, Cohen told the students, there will be people telling them how to do things.

“That’s what school is all about, right?” he said.

But there will also be plenty of opportunities — such as making a film with no money or training — where people have to learn to be more open-minded and consider new ways of doing things.

“Sometimes you don’t have to do something the way everyone else has done it,” Cohen said. “Sometimes there’s a benefit to do something in your own weird way that no one else has ever thought of. And sometimes that’s a better way to do it. Sometimes, as it was for me, that was the only way to do it.”

One thing Cohen noticed while making “Humanity Stoked” was the power of surrounding himself with people who were positive and supportive.

“Surrounding your life with people that are encouraging and supportive, people that aren’t going to be jealous or envious of the things that you do, it is tremendously powerful how that can lift you up and help reduce your fears to give you confidence in your ability to do anything you want and to think any way you want, and to have a perspective about something that’s not shaped by things that people are telling you,” he said.

Living in a state of fear, Cohen said, leads to those societal problems such as racism, bigotry and gender inequality, and it makes all those issues worse. It also limits a person, creating tunnel vision.

“It affects the way you treat people,” he said. “It affects the way you treat yourself, and you end up creating these walls where you live in this very limited way. … So it’s important to really think about what you’re afraid of and not care about it.”

For Cohen, documenting some of these issues was just the beginning. While exploring those issues, he also tried to understand “what causes inequality, what causes people to mistreat others, what causes people to just act in a way that is not beneficial to the greater good. And a lot of that is fear.”

Cohen tried to learn more about fear — in other people and himself.

“It’s important to take the time to really think about the feelings you have and understand where they are coming from,” he said. “When you do that, you may find that it actually changes the way you feel about certain things. And that’s very empowering.”

As one of the skaters in the film said, this conversation is bigger than the skateboarder. It’s the person.

“In the end, all of us can understand the challenges facing humanity,” Cohen said at the end of his trailer. “The question is, ‘What are we going to do about it?'”

When Cohen sells the showing rights to “Humanity Stoked,” he plans to donate all the proceeds to a foundation he co-founded, the whatstopsyou.org Foundation. It provides inspirational speakers at no cost to schools, youth groups and other nonprofit organizations with the mission of offering “hope, guidance and encouragement for both children and adults who need it most, particularly in low socioeconomic and underprivileged areas.”

See the full Lake Placid Film Festival schedule at www.adirondackfilm.org.