Film explores the atypical lifestyle of Naropa founder
By Adam Perry, Boulder Weekly
Of all the films featured at the 2011 Boulder International Film Festival, the most Boulder-centric is Crazy Wisdom. The 90-minute documentary is Los Angeles filmmaker Johanna Demetrakas’ stunning tribute to the late Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the Tibetan Buddhist who founded Naropa University in 1974. Demetrakas will be on hand for a Q-and-A after the BIFF screening of Crazy Wisdom,which sadly, for such a profound (and profoundly Boulder-related) film, is occurring at 2:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 18, at the First United Methodist Church, rather than enjoying prime-time billing at the Boulder Theater.
Demetrakas, who teaches at the University of Southern California in addition to directing both dramatic and documentary films, met Trungpa in 1971 and kept in touch until his death in 1987. Subsequently, Demetrakas — through four-and-a-half years of active filmmaking and five years of research — was able to capture perhaps the first truly intimate and honest picture of Trungpa’s controversial life.
Watching Crazy Wisdom in Boulder recently with a gathering of current and former Naropa students, it was obvious that Demetrakas succeeded in not only delineating Trungpa’s fascinating escape from Chinese tyranny in Tibet and the meat of his “Shambhala” vision — a peaceful, mindful community amid a dangerously chaotic world — but also what it was like to know “the bad boy of Buddhism” personally. For Naropa students, who are fed a PC version of Trungpa’s life — which notoriously included excessive drinking and sex — Demetrakas’ unflinching portrayal of her former spiritual guide is refreshing.
“The film was not so much about his teachings as it was about him,” she says. “One of the directions that I made to myself was that I wanted to make a film where my audience gets to experience his mind, even a glimpse. I feel like if you experience that, if you go through your own changes, questioning him, questioning his life, questioning where Naropa’s at right now or whatever … you go beyond that and just be there. I wanted you to experience what being around him was for me. So I hope I got that done a little bit.”
~ more... ~
~ See also The top ten dirty literary men ~
No comments:
Post a Comment