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Wednesday, 16 February 2005
IBFF, 12-13 Feb. ::
Saw more movies in the 2nd International Buddhist Film Festival in Berkeley this past Saturday and Sunday.
The first program Saturday afternoon was a trio of shorts. There was a cancellation so I Heart Huckabees Infomercial played again. I liked it even more the second time. Little Monk is a short documentary by a then-13-year-old American boy, who followed his curiosity to the Himalayas to record this story of a 6-year-old young boy leaving his family to become a monk. The filmmaker finds himself wondering what it would be like to live without computers, televisions ... or any toys at all. The program concluded with a funny and touching episode of the Fox series King of the Hill, where young Bobby is identified as the reincarnation of a great lama.
Rivers and Tides was perhaps the high point of the festival. I might have missed it if it hadn’t been scheduled in between two other things I’d picked out to see! Artist Andy Goldworthy creates gorgeous art, often using natural materials in outdoor locations, putting hours of work into pieces that frequently fall apart within hours or even seconds after they’re finished—if they even survive long enough to be finished. The camera beautifully captures the essence of these pieces in showing them from birth to death. We see Goldworthy being struck by inspiration, going with the flow as he builds a work, and, after it’s complete, watching how it changes. I liked his attitude about his work. He spoke about it being essential to his sanity, and yet he had no pretense about what it ought to mean to anyone else; he creates for the sake of creation. Soundtrack composer Fred Frith was present and answered questions afterwards. He spoke about how Goldworthy often created pieces out of “found objects,” so he’d asked the filmmaker for all the raw audio from the shoots, and had sampled various sounds to use in the score.
I don’t know if it was just that I was tired of sitting in a movie theater for two previous programs, but I didn’t get much out of Join Me in Shambhala and The Lion’s Roar except to further marvel at the elaborateness of Tibetan ritual. The first one struck me as analogous to a film about a Catholic bishop traveling around, performing a variety of ceremonies and well-fed wherever he goes. The latter was a bit better for the interviews with the late 16th Gyalwang Karmapa and his students, including Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and their observations on the importance of meditation and mindfulness.
Angulimala is an epic Thai feature, apparently very true to an early sutra about a bandit and murderer who meets the Buddha on the road. It’s a grand and entertaining drama, but also conveys the central principles of Buddhism clearly. It offers much for reflection on how the same elements and truths are at play, on smaller scales, in our own lives. To what lengths will we go to justify our beliefs about right and wrong?
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