Life as Cinema by Anika Tokarchuk is a 56-minute documentary about the making of The Cup (1999) (高山上的足球盃), the debut feature film of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche (aka Khyentse Norbu).
Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, a spiritual director of several Buddhist colleges in India, Bhutan and Sikkim, is recognized in his culture as the third incarnation of the Khyentse lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. Life as Cinema voices his Buddhist reflections on the impermanence of life.
PHOTO: BEN ZULLO
The film begins with Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche making a shadow butterfly on the wall with his hands. While the butterfly's magnified shadow flaps its dark wings on a white wall, he asks, "How do you know this is a butterfly?"
The shadow on the wall is like reality projected on the screen of our mind. The layers of illusion and reality are interwoven into each other. While the theme of illusion is dominant in the film, the encounter between modernity and tradition in everyday Tibetan culture is also telescoped into Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche's character.
Educated in London and given his first movie-related job by Bernardo Bertolucci in Little Buddha, Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoch rides the tide of westernization and redefines his role as a Rinpoche.
When Tokarchuk informs the Dalai Lama that Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche is making a feature film based on the real events of the monks at Dzongsar Institute, he breaks into laughter commenting, "Oh, I see, lamas are actors now."
As she reveals in her documentary, the actors in The Cup are all from a real monastery and cast by their ecclesiastical superior. (Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche coaxed 14-year-old Jamyang Lodro into playing the role of Orgyen in The Cup with a promise of taking him to Disneyland.)
Jovial and with a sense of absurdity, Life as Cinema rings quiet notes of political urgency. Unlike other dramas on Tibet such as Kundun (1997) and Seven Years in Tibet (1997), Tokarchuk does not portray Tibet as mired in Chinese suppression. Instead, Life as Cinema tracks the footsteps of Tibetan Buddhists to India, France, England, Canada, Hong Kong, and of course Taiwan.
It is, after all, a documentary on Tibet-on-the-move, a film on the nature of change and openness.
The second part of the trilogy will go into the background of Dzongsar monastery in Tibet and focus on Karpu Lama, a Tibetan who now lives in Taiwan.
In a partial preview, Karpu's exile from Tibet is captured in a soliloquy that drifts across beautifully crafted images of Tibetan valleys and Taipei's streets. "Life is dreamlike," says Tokarchuk, "but it is also telling a history."
For your information :
There will be a free public screening of Life as Cinema at the Wisteria Tea House (
Recently the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and its Mini-Me partner in the legislature, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), have been arguing that construction of chip fabs in the US by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is little more than stripping Taiwan of its assets. For example, KMT Legislative Caucus First Deputy Secretary-General Lin Pei-hsiang (林沛祥) in January said that “This is not ‘reciprocal cooperation’ ... but a substantial hollowing out of our country.” Similarly, former TPP Chair Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) contended it constitutes “selling Taiwan out to the United States.” The two pro-China parties are proposing a bill that
It starts out as a heartwarming clip. A young girl, clearly delighted to be in Tokyo, beams as she makes a peace sign to the camera. Seconds later, she is shoved to the ground from behind by a woman wearing a surgical mask. The assailant doesn’t skip a beat, striding out of shot of the clip filmed by the girl’s mother. This was no accidental clash of shoulders in a crowded place, but one of the most visible examples of a spate of butsukari otoko — “bumping man” — shoving incidents in Japan that experts attribute to a combination of gender
The race for New Taipei City mayor is being keenly watched, and now with the nomination of former deputy mayor of Taipei Hammer Lee (李四川) as the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) candidate, the battle lines are drawn. All polling data on the tight race mentioned in this column is from the March 12 Formosa poll. On Christmas Day 2010, Taipei County merged into one mega-metropolis of four million people, making it the nation’s largest city. The same day, the winner of the mayoral race, Eric Chu (朱立倫) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), took office and insisted on the current
Last month, media outlets including the BBC World Service and Bloomberg reported that China’s greenhouse gas emissions are currently flat or falling, and that the economic giant appears to be on course to comfortably meet Beijing’s stated goal that total emissions will peak no later than 2030. China is by far and away the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, generating more carbon dioxide than the US and the EU combined. As the BBC pointed out in their Feb. 12 report, “what happens in China literally could change the world’s weather.” Any drop in total emissions is good news, of course. By
RSS