Suppose you were told as a child that you were the reincarnation of a great spiritual teacher who lived and died on the other side of the planet, in a culture utterly unlike your own? Gesar Mukpo, the son of the late Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa was recognized at age 3 as the reincarnation of Trungpa’s own teacher in Tibet, Jamgon Kongtrul. Although others identified in this way - tulkus - are traditionally reared in a monastery and trained by wise, dedicated senior monks, Gezar was born in the West. Like most of his contemporaries, he has largely had to make his own way, forging a path that has veered between two often contradictory worldviews. His fascinating film, Tulku, examines the challenges, aspirations, guilt, and contradictions of his journey and those of other Western-born tulkus. It also explicitly and implicitly questions the tulku tradition, suggesting that it may not survive in the West. Tulku raises other significant questions as well: how it is that teachers arrive in our midst altogether? What makes them who they are? How can their traditions be reconciled with modern Western life? This film explores these issues with a frankness and intimacy only possible in one who is living them



Le Quattro Volte
Saturday, November 5, 7pm   
Starring Giusseppe Fuda
Directed by Michelangelo Frammartino
88 min

What is the soul of a thing? Can it be transmitted from one being to another horizontally during life? Does it migrate vertically across the shadowy border of death into the country of a new life and being, or is each of us merely the result of prior, soulless causes and conditions? The indescribable, one-of-a-kind Le Quattro Volte breathes intensely physical life into these perennial questions - of deep concern both to the Buddha’s contemporaries and to Western seekers like Pythagoras - as it wordlessly attends to a Calabrian goat herder, one of his tiny charges, a towering tree, and the charcoal kiln it is destined to enter. Gorgeous, transfixing, often hilarious, Le Quattro Volte is like a divine eye, simply observing the flow of life past birth and death, and sweeping the viewer quietly but vividly along their mysterious byways as no film in memory



Another Year
Saturday, December 3, 7pm
Starring Jim Broadbent, Lesley Manville, Ruth Sheen
Directed by Mike Leigh
129 min

How is it that some of us arrive at happiness and purpose, while others can’t help but stumble over them and straggle past? For Tom and Gerri, Another Year’s contented middle-aged couple, no special formula is required apart from love and work, which Freud called the cornerstone of being human. As they prepare to welcome their likeminded son and his new fiancée into the fold - an almost effortless transmission of Tom/Gerri’s simplicity and devotion - other more afflicted friends and relations converge upon them, flailing about or foundering on inner impediments. Absent of any particular wisdom, the older couple will be unwaveringly clear with their suffering circle, offering an opportunity for insight that may - or may not - be taken up. As with Mike Leigh’s other films (including last year’s series hit Happy-Go-Lucky), the magic of Another Year is that it feels entirely natural and lived in. Director, actors, and viewers become so deeply attuned to emotional nuance that the least gesture can elicit almost unbearable hilarity, discomfort, or rue. Another Year’s deceptive simplicity gently invites us as well to locate and reflect upon its predicaments as they might touch our own lives


Departures
Saturday, January 7, 7pm   
Starring Masahiro Motoki, Ryoko Hirosue, Tsutomu Yamazaki
Directed by Yojiro Takita
130 min

When Daigo, a young cellist loses his job with a symphony orchestra, he is forced to take a job as an undertaker (in Japanese an “encoffiner”) to support himself and his young wife. In director Yojiro Takita’s hands, this becomes a profound, unconventional and enlightening inquiry into the meaning of death and the healing power of the rituals that surround it. Although friends and family initially turn away, Daigo’s courageous journey brings unexpected transformation and a deeper appreciation for life. Departures won the 2009 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film


The World Of Apu
Saturday, February 4, 7pm 
Starring Soumitra Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore
Directed by Satyajit Ray
106 min

Like his father before him, the young Brahmin dreamer Apu has come to the big city, 1930s Calcutta, to write a novel and make his fortune. By a strange sequence of events, Apu connects with the lovely Aparna, who is tragically betrothed to another. What follows will bring Apu the same kind of momentous challenges and unexpected opportunities for growth that marked the earlier Pather Panchali and Aparajito, culminating in one of the most uplifting embraces in all of cinema. Heartbreaking and utterly absorbing, the film immediately plunges one into a world long past, with scenes of almost magical beauty and simplicity. Though it is the final installment of Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s award-winning Apu Trilogy, one needn’t have seen the first two parts nor read the Bandopadhyay novels on which they’re based to enjoy and appreciate The World Of Apu, Ray’s wise masterpiece...and Apu’s



Cave Of Forgotten Dreams
Saturday, March 3, 7pm
Directed by Werner Herzog
90 min

32,000 years ago, early humans entered a cavern in the south of France and created hundreds of elaborate paintings over thousands of years.  The paintings in the Chauvet Cave, including animals, humans and abstract forms are the oldest known to exist.  Rediscovered in 1994, the cave was immediately sealed off to the public, until Werner Herzog's documentary film crew was given unprecedented access to the Chauvet Cave for the filming of this documentary, originally filmed also in 3D.  Exploring the cave's artwork and history in this documentary, Herzog explores deeper questions about humanity and our universal creative and spiritual drives is his own eccentric and inimitable style



The Tree Of Life
Saturday, April 7, 7pm
Starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn
Directed by Terrence Malick
139 min

Was there ever really a Garden Of Eden? In Terrence Malick’s long-awaited new film the question is not whether the biblical account of Genesis is true, but instead how did life began for us? His Eden was Waco, Texas in the early 1950’s - a timeless orchard uncluttered by TVs or texting, where the only thing separating a child from nature’s flow was a screen door. In this idyll, the young Jack is torn between the energies of his mother, a radiant naive beaming with grace, and an intense, frustrated father who sees himself in a Darwinian struggle for survival against nature. This chasm is as ancient as life itself, Malick will show with mindbending images of unfolding creation and evolution. The pulls of nature and grace may even divide the life of one who has grown and reflected well upon life and loss, as in the older Jack one meets throughout. The Tree Of Life is the only Malick film with any scenes set within his own lifetime, and the deeply personal nature of its vision only adds to its universality. As in Debussy’s dictum that his music should sound as if played on a piano without hammers, Malick’s camera and microphones disappear as we’re swept along in the play of rambunctious children, or wracked by the thrill of Jack's erotic discovery, or hovering within his mind as the voices of those now departed plead and instruct. The Tree Of Life is beyond time and generation - it is an indelibly affecting memoir that dares to draw the connection between its momentary human actors and the immemorial cosmic genesis of us all



Crazy Wisdom: The Life & Times Of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Saturday, May 5, 7pm
Directed by Johanna Demetrakas
86 min

Just as America had never seen a decade like the 1960s, it has never experienced anyone like Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. Born in Tibet in 1939, he was indentified as a reincarnated lama or tulku at age 2. He was extensively trained in the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages before escaping from Tibet in 1959, settling in India and eventually going to study at Oxford during the blooming of the US and European countercultures. Emigrating to the United States in 1970, he established the Naropa Institute, the first Buddhist university in the West, as well as the network of Shambhala meditation centers. Brilliant, drunken, noble, licentious - Trungpa was as unconventional as he was versatile, his intellect and force of personality drawing artists, intellectuals, and controversy to his side like moths to a flame. Although his teaching could be very disciplined and demanding, it was also frequently outrageous and unpredictable. Crazy Wisdom, Trungpa student Johanna Demetrakas’ hugely entertaining new biodocumentary, is the name sometimes given this volatile style of spiritual guidance. Although a feature familiar within many Asian traditions, it was new to Trungpa’s western students, alternately delighting and disturbing them. Trungpa’s abiding intention, however, was to keep everybody around him alert and a little off balance, as the film makes clear. Crazy Wisdom is both an insightful account of the controversial teacher and an eye-opening chronicle of the 1960s and 70s, capturing some of their energy, creativity, idealism, and folly. It also provides a unique, fly-on-the-wall view of one Tibetan Buddhist lineage’s migration to the West, with consequences ranging from comical to uplifting to tragic