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Sunday, 30 January 2005
IBFF, 30 Jan. ::
Went to the Castro Theatre in SF today for a couple of shows in the 2nd International Buddhist Film Festival.
The Prison Sutras is a 33-minute documentary about Fleet Maull, “a practicing Buddhist who led a double life as a drug smuggler.” The film is mostly excerpts of interviews with Maull, sometimes overlaid with clips of intricate mechanical contraptions (analogous to our busy minds) and Buddhist art depicting beings suffering in hells of their own making (referring to Maull’s drug addiction). By the end of the film I was wishing for the story to be told using just about anything other than the interviews. (I’m remembering my college creative writing instructor from 25 years ago: “show, don’t tell!”) There were a few brief shots of Maull speaking with an ill (dying?) patient in a prison hospital; I would have liked to have seen more scenes like this, showing how he directly, and apparently, profoundly, affected those around him. For despite the film’s relying so heavily on the interviews, it does deliver a powerful message about how, once having found some degree of inner peace through meditation, the question is: what happens when we come down from the mountain and interact with others?
Destroyer of Illusion is a “richly detailed and beautifully filmed portrait of a secret Tibetan Buddhist ritual. Richard Gere narrates with the clarity and resonant depth of an insider.” (Quote from the IBFF program.) The preceding IMDB link is to the original, longer version of the film, which was aimed more at those already familiar with Tibetan Buddhism. This new version, premiered today, was shortened and the narration redone for a more general audience. I marveled at the elaborateness of this 3-week ritual; as one who came to Buddhism through Zen, I find this a quite different flavor of Buddhism. But what becomes vividly apparent towards the end is how central their religious tradition is to the Tibetans’ entire cultural fabric. I found this beautiful and moving.
Hi! Dharma! is a comedy about Korean gangsters going into hiding in a remote mountain monastery. The IMDB page has a somewhat lukewarm review from one viewer apparently more familiar with the Korean gangster movie tradition than with Korean Zen, but I’m the opposite, which probably helped me catch enough hilarious bits to have found it thoroughly enjoyable. One high point is when the master settles a disagreement between the other monks and gangsters. The master gives them a puzzle. The monks think it impossible and try to solve it with clever intellectual wordplay. The gangsters are nothing if not men of action...
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