Dalai Lama Renaissance, Saturday in HMB

At 7:30pm on Saturday May 10th, local viewers will be treated to a sneak preview screening of the award winning Dalai Lama Renaissance at the Johnson House Depot, hosted by The Visionary Edge. 

Nathan Southern of All Movie Guide says "As the curtain rapidly fell on the 20th Century, his holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, grew so deeply troubled by the state of the modern world that he invited 40 pivotal Western thinkers to his secluded home in Northern India’s Himalayan Mountains, for a lengthy and pointed brainstorming session on the problems of contemporary society and how to solve them most effectively. Foreseeing the importance of this event, documentarist Khashyar Darvich joined the group with an 18-member, 5-camera crew in tow (sponsored by the Wakan Foundation for the Arts) and sought to capture the event on film. This yielded some 140 hours of video footage, edited down to feature length for Darvich’s documentary Dalai Lama Renaissance. The film preserves, in 80 minutes, the most insightful, illuminative and engaging dialogues from Gyatso’s conference."

Synthesis participants from the film, locals Nancy Margulies and Gary Warhaftig, along with another bay area participant Barry Rosen, will conduct a Q & A with the audience after the screening.

The event will be held on Saturday, May 10th at the Johnson House Depot.  Doors will open at 7:00pm, event begins at 7:30.  Advance tickets $10, door $15. Call 650-560-0200 for information and reservations.  

"I narrated Dalai Lama Renaissance," says actor Harrison Ford, "because I believe His Holiness is making a positive influence in our world.  For me, the film represented an opportunity to continue assisting the optimistic efforts of an extraordinary individual."  

The film also features two of the starring quantum physicists from the hit documentary "What the Bleep Do We Know," physicists Fred Alan Wolf and Ami Goswami. Also appearing in Dalai Lama Renaissance are Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith (founder and director of Agape International Spiritual Center, who appears in the film The Secret with Wolf), ground-breaking social scientist Jean Houston and author/radio host Thom Hartmann.                                                                 

According to Jean Miyake Downey of the Kyoto Journal "This is a revelatory documentary about the "Everyman" journey from egocentric consciousness to something more sublime. The film follows forty global experts in their fields who traveled to Dharamsala to advise the Dalai Lama. The first scenes reveal a hilariously clashing hootenanny of mild-mannered Engaged Buddhists, solemn Catholics, gabby physicists intent on demonstrating the convergence of quantum physics with ultimate reality, New Agers dressed in purple, social change visionaries, and progressive economists, all engaged in "synthesizing" and "witnessing" brain-storming to collect all their brilliant ideas to present to the fourteenth Dalai Lama. This well-educated and well-mannered group then revolted against their endlessly patient facilitators, in a gray-haired inverse variation of the "Lord of the Flies." Throughout the chaos that ensued, each player was shown as confronting her or his own ego, as much as they confronted the facilitators and fellow participants. Their conflicts with each other, and most of all, with their own egos were actually uplifting, as they struggled to be truthful and respectful while their "bubbling over" clashed with the facilitators’ attempts to create some order out of the unwieldy explosion of dialogue.  

Then something broke open.  

Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama, who kept referring to himself as nothing but a "simple monk," spoke. And, what he said, and the way he said it sounded like a clear, clear bell that shattered all the clashing mental abstractions, and brought attention back to the human level… I saw the transformations of the participants simply becoming more of who they really are, as whatever was obscuring their inner radiance fell away. i actually felt as if I was feeling some of that myself, as if these wonderful energies were emanating from the small movie screen . .  Compassion. Joy. Happiness. Even while suffering in participation and/or witness with and struggling to address the world’s problems "

Says Vanderpool of The Visionary Edge, "The Dalai Lama made clear that his priority is "to promote basic human values." He suggested that the only solution that ultimately would be successful, is one that supports all people, both Tibetans and Chinese; that anything that creates harm in any way for any person, he could not support.  One of the Synthesis participants, Elizabet Sathouris, after witnessing the conflict within the Synthesis group, suggested the importance of getting in touch with our own "inner Tibets" before they could effectively work on the outer Tibet.  Of course, to affect lasting change that brings peace to the planet, both must be done, the inner work as well as the outer."

According to director-producer  Kashyar Darvich "At first, we expected great thinkers would solve the world’s problems. Halfway through, we realized the story was about the inner journeys of the Synthesis participants. What happened when the Dalai Lama spoke became the story; it even became the film’s title, Dalai Lama Renaissance."

Says Jean Miyake Downey of the Kyoto Journal "This film is a startlingly original, revelatory documentary, a beautiful and fresh window on the Dalai Lama."  

Located in Half Moon Bay, The Visionary Edge is a transformative arts and events organization committed to inspiring all to create a wiser, more sustainable and compassionate world.