![[green buddha head with yellow top knot, blue ears, and orange triangle at third eye, above international buddhist film festival in black type and official selection series in blue type]](https://buddhistfilmfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/IBFF-OFFICIAL-SELECTION-SERIES-V-blue-188x247-1.png)
The IBFF Official Selection Series launched on December 8, 2024 at its home venue, the Smith Rafael Film Center.
Co-presented by California Film Institute and Buddhist Film Foundation, the IBFF Official Selections Series is ongoing. These special in-theater-only event screenings feature live participation of filmmakers, directors, or film subjects, and are one time only.
Please stay tuned for news on upcoming events and screenings.
![[six rows of stacked black cap text between black laurels, official selection, and international buddhist film festival 2025 in bold]](https://buddhistfilmfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Official-Selection-IBFF-2025-black-laurels.png)
O Mother Gaia—The World of Gary Snyder
Directed by Colin Still
UK / 2024 / English / 102 min plus panel / Documentary
WORLD PREMIERE
Sunday, March 9, 4:30 pm — SOLD OUT
In Person: Director Colin Still
Special Guests: Peter Coyote, Jane Hirshfield, and Jack Shoemaker
Community Partner: San Francisco Zen Center
Screening followed by panel conversation with special guests
O Mother Gaia—The World of Gary Snyder
Directed by Colin Still
UK / 2024 / English / 128 min plus Q&A / Documentary
Friday, March 14, 7:00 pm — ENCORE SCREENING
In Person: Director Colin Still
Screening followed by a new short featuring Gary Snyder, Songs from Turtle Island, plus Director Colin Still in conversation with BFF Executive Director Gaetano Maida, with Q&A
![[older man with salt and pepper hair, moustache, and beard, wearing thin, circular, wire framed glasses, small gold hoop earrings in his left ear, and a dark gray shirt with light red patterns, smiles to camera, with a lush green background]](https://buddhistfilmfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/o-mother-gaia-festival-250x167-1.jpg)
This is the first feature-length film documenting the life and work of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet/activist Gary Snyder. A participant in the famed 1955 Six Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco that launched the Beat era (and the careers of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac), Snyder later lived and studied in Japan, becoming a Zen teacher. He is the model for the character of Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s bestselling novel, The Dharma Bums.
The film was skillfully assembled and remastered from the filmmaker’s original 1990s 16mm footage shot for British television, and offers a vivid self portrait of the famously elusive poet and essayist through his poems and commentary.
Filmed on location at his Kitkitdizzie/Ring of Bone Zendo home in the Sierra and other locations connected with him, it also features key archival footage from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as contemporaneous readings and commentary by Peter Coyote, Jane Hirshfield, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Shoemaker, and Michael McClure, and a precious interview with Snyder’s late wife Carole Koda.
Wisdom of Happiness—A Heart-to-Heart with the Dalai Lama
Directed by Barbara Miller and Philip Delaquis
Executive Produced by Richard Gere and Oren Moverman
USA, Switzerland / 2024 / English / 90 min plus Q&A / Documentary
WEST COAST PREMIERE
Sunday, January 19, 4:30 pm
In Person: Director Barbara Miller
Introductory video with Richard Gere
![[asian man with shaved head, bushy eyebrows, maroon and gold robes, and red shawl draped on his left shoulder, speaks to camera while holding a small ball of the earth in with his left hand fingers, while gesturing with a raised right hand]](https://buddhistfilmfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/wisdom-of-happiness-festival-250x167-1.jpg)
In what is likely to be the last great filmed testimony of the 14th Dalai Lama, this film captures him speaking through the camera directly to viewers, creating a sense of a private audience. In an intimate heart-to-heart, the world’s greatest ambassador of compassion invites everyone along for a journey to the source of happiness.
As he approaches his 90th birthday, the Dalai Lama reflects on his life balancing millennia-old Tibetan Buddhist traditions with contemporary values of our globalized society that now struggles to overcome violence and war while at the brink of environmental collapse. While happiness is born in each of us, only the cultivation of unconditional compassion for one another will transform the world.
Filmed on location in Dharamshala, India, with rare archival footage from the Dalai Lama’s family collection.
![[six rows of stacked black cap text between black laurels, official selection, and international buddhist film festival 2024 in bold]](https://buddhistfilmfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Official-Selection-IBFF-2024-black-laurels.png)
Pig at the Crossing
Directed by Khyentse Norbu
Bhutan / 2024 / English, and Dzongkha with English subtitles / 122 min plus Q&A / Drama
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
Sunday, December 8, 4:30 pm
Live Zoom Q&A with Director Khyentse Norbu
![[asian man in white checkered top under a dark brown leather jacket with assorted decals, stares out blankly in a golden, shadowy room with fabric walls and hanging and bright spot over his head]](https://buddhistfilmfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/pig-at-the-crossing-festival-250x167-1.jpg)
Filmed on location in the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, Pig at the Crossing joins a select group of ambitious films that take the viewer on a journey through the bardo—the gap, or interval, between this life and the next (or, between birth and death). These include Bardo, by Alejandro Iñarritu, as well as Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, Giuseppe Tornatore’s A Pure Formality, and even The Sixth Sense, among others. Unlike those, however, Norbu’s playful film is a low budget project that carries with it the director’s keen sense of all the resonances of the bardo teachings, a key component of Tibetan Buddhist tradition, detailed in The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
