The 13th edition of Buddhist Film Festival in Europe (BFFE) will feature fifteen films and a special keynote event with American Zen teacher angel Kyodo williams. The theme of this year’s BFFE is “Radical Presence,” inspired by williams’ notion of “your liberation is bound up with mine.”
According to BFFE director Babeth M. VanLoo, radical presence refers to the spiritual aspect of social healing, in keeping with her commitment to the potential in Buddhism in which “the world itself is our field of practice.”
Two films at this year’s BFFE had their US premieres at IBFF 2018, Zen for Nothing, by Werner Penzel and Ayako Mogi, a direct cinema immersion in a Japanese Zen monastery over three seasons; and Honeygiver Among the Dogs, the dramatic feature debut of Bhutanese director Dechen Roder, a detective story of the search for a missing Buddhist abbess that invokes dakinis and mystery, filmed on location in Bhutan.
Other highlights include the opening night feature, The Departure, a documentary by American Lana Wilson about a Japanese Zen priest who works with people who are suicidal; The Venerable W, by Barbet Shroeder, a doc about Burmese monk, Venerable Wirathu, who has gained fame and power there as a virulently anti-Islamic racist fundamentalist; The Silent Dance of Life, Aleksandra Kumorek’s portrait of the late Ruth Denison; a special screening of a restored print of Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic Stalker, inspired by his engagement with Zen; and a short featuring Ram Dass contemplating death, Ram Dass, Going Home, by Derek Peck.
BFFE grew out of founder VanLoo’s work as founding program director of BOS (now BodhiTV), the first (and still only) Buddhist broadcaster in Europe. She participated in IBFF 2005 SAN FRANCISCO, and the following year presented IBFF 2006 in Amsterdam. A local organization, BFFE, formed to sustain the annual festival program.
The EYE Filmmuseum is the Dutch national museum for film, located at Amsterdam’s IJ harbour. It manages more than 40,000 films from all genres. EYE is highly regarded for its knowledge of and expertise in the field of film restoration, research, and education. EYE was founded in 2010 as a result of the merger between four organizations: the Filmmuseum, Holland Film, the Filmbank, and the Netherlands Institute for Film Education. EYE [link to: https://www.eyefilm.nl/en]
