ZEN OPEN CIRCLE presents the 11th annual
REEL to REAL film festival ~
The Zen Open Circle invites you to a screening of 5 remarkable
films and documentaries over 3 sessions. The sessions include
delicious food, meet-the-filmmaker sessions and insightful
discussions led by film scholar & director Dr Susan Murphy, who
is also a Zen Roshi.
Join us for 1, 2 or all 3 sessions @107 PROJECTS, 107 Redfern
Street, Redfern, on September 13, 2014, from 1.30pm – 9.30pm
http://www.107projects.org/
Selected and presented by Zen teacher Susan Murphy Roshi, author of
Upside-Down Zen and Minding the Earth, Mending the World, who draws on an
extensive background in film-making (including the prize-winning feature
Breathing Under Water) and film scholarship (including The Screening of
Australia, Vols 1 and 2).
This year REEL to REAL includes:

three exceptional recent Australian documentaries, two of them
exploring the determined struggle of Buddhist nuns to restore their right
to practice and to full ordination in a tradition long hostile to women; and
one showing how strongly united and loving a low-income community
can grow when it finds a project in which everyone will eventually have a
stake – a not-for-profit, community-owned, purely local funeral business!

a rarely-seen film classic judged by 100 international film critics to be
the finest spiritual film ever made, one that draws its audience into a
transcendent and deeply moving contemplation of impermanence,
suffering, cruelty and compassion.

and in the closing session, back by special request, the all-time
favourite of festivals past: a deeply wise comedy that lovingly re-admits
us to deeper understanding of our deluded compassionate selves through
the most human door of all ~ the one marked ‘loving humour’.
TICKET PRICES

$21.50/$16.50 per session (includes food & refreshments)
HOW TO BUY TICKETS
Buy tickets online at https://www.stickytickets.com.au/19097
Note:
 Valid concessions are Pension, Health or current Student card.
 Tickets must be retained for accessing refreshments or re-entering for a
subsequent session.
Come enjoy the welcoming community atmosphere created by
Zen Open Circle for Sydney’s film-loving and spiritually-curious
people drawn each year to our Reel to Real winter feast of
exceptional films, delicious food, and insightful conversation.
The Program:
"Nirvana is the capacity to maintain one's composure
in the face of ceaseless change." Suzuki Roshi
SESSION ONE: 1.30pm-3.30pm ~ Amazing women
The Buddha’s Forgotten Nuns (Australia, 2013) 34 mins +
Ven Sujato + dir. Wiriya Sati Link to trailer
The Cave in the Snow (Australia, 2002) dir. Liz Williams 52
mins
SESSION TWO: 3.30pm- 7pm ~ Suffering transcended
Tender (Australia, 2013) dir. Lynette Wallworth 75 mins
Watch a clip
Au hasard, Balthazar (France, 1966) dir. Robert Bresson 95
mins - Link to trailer
SESSION THREE: 7.30pm-9.30pm ~ Wise laughter
Enlightenment Guaranteed (Germany/Japan, 2002) 109
mins, dir. Doris Dorrie - Link to trailer
The Films:
1. Documentaries
The Buddha’s Forgotten Nuns (Australia, 2013)
Ten years in the making, Wiriya Sati’s searching documentary expamines
attempts to revive the lost or supporessed order of bhikkhunis, or fully ordained
nuns, created by Shakyamuni Buddha more than 2,500 years ago. Asking two
questions — “Is Buddhism a religious movement based on equality? Or is it
rooted in a male-dominated culture found in most other world religions?” — Sati
travels throughout Asia and the West, discovering both intractable conservatism
and those intent on pushing beyond cultural barriers, including the remarkable
push in the Australian context several years ago to break ranks with the fierce
opposition of the Thai Forest Monk home temple and to hold the ordination
ceremony for six nuns in Perth.
Cave in the Snow (Australia, 2002)
In the 1970s a young English-woman Diane Perry ventured into the snow-laden
peaks of the Himalayan Mountains. Her search for perfection had led her to
Tibetan Buddhism, where she took on the name Tenzin Palmo. But she found few
opportunities for women to study the teachings, and so, in 1976, after battling
with blatant sexism within the monastic order, she isolated herself in a remote
Himalayan cave, engaging in 12 years of Buddhist meditation. She faced
unimaginable cold, wild animals, near starvation and avalanches, with calm
aplomb. Leaving her cave, she encountered – and openly questioned - the even
more formidable adversity and prejudice her tradition placed in the path of
women desiring full access to practice. In response she built a nunnery in India,
where women would have an opportunity to study Buddha’s teachings, and
travels the world as a fund-raiser, giving talks, writing books and serving as a
model for the many young women who wish to dedicate their lives to a spiritual
path.
Tender (Australia, 2013)
Set against the stunning backdrop of the seaside steel town of Port Kembla, a
feisty and resilient community group have determined to take back the
responsibility that most of us leave to someone else – to care for their own dead.
Scattered throughout are stories that cut to the core revealing why this small
band have decided to take on a practice that for most is taboo. As their plans for
community-based funerals gather momentum one of their own is diagnosed with
a life-threatening illness. TENDER is at once a heartbreakingly beautiful and
beautifully funny glimpse of an intrepid community taking on one of the most
powerful challenges of human life…its end. The director Lynette Wallworth is an
accalaimed Australian artist/filmmaker whose immersive video installations and
film works explore fragile human states of grace, and connections with the
natural world, with great sensitivity.
2. Features
Au hasard Balthazar (France, 1966)
(‘By chance, Balthazar’) Film critic Roger Ebert described Bresson as one of the
saints of the cinema, and "Au Hasard Balthazar" (1966) as his most
heartbreaking prayer. The film follows the life of a donkey, Balthazar (also the
name of one of the Three Wise Kings) in a small French village of essentially
flawed and limited human beings willing or unable not to inflict pain upon each
other, and upon ‘dumb animals’. We see his first unsteady steps as a newborn,
his mysterious ‘baptism’ by three children in a moment of rare sweetness, his
succession of owners and the treatment he receives at their hands, and his death.
There is no sentimental ending nor any Disney overtone to Balthazar’s endearing
presence; as Ebert says, ‘Balthazar simply walks or waits, regarding everything
with the clarity of a donkey who knows it is a beast of burden, and that its life
consists of either bearing or not bearing, of feeling pain or not feeling pain…. All
of these things are equally beyond its control.’ Bresson’s films achieve a kind of
civilizing and spiritual purity that render them remarkably emotional despite the
unemotional conduct of his characters. The actors portray lives without ever
telling us how to feel about them. This is the cinema of an exacting empathy.
Humans are said to bear the ‘image of God’, but it is a donkey called Balthazar
who yields us an image of Christ, here, in the completeness of his forbearance
and the grace of his manner. This is a film that is utterly unforgettable, in ways
you will find difficult to bring to words. Little wonder that is consistently ranked
the most spiritual of masterpiece films.
Enlightenment Guaranteed (Germany/Japan, 2002)
Gustav and Uwe are two likeable but ill-matched middle-aged German brothers
who travel to the Zen monastery of Monzen, five train transfers from Tokyo,
seeking enlightenment - or if not that, then at least something to do when their
lives start to fall apart. Inevitably they keep bumping into themselves more
obviously than enlightenment itself, and not liking it at all.
Still smarting from an unexpected $600 bar bill after a long night's drinking, the
brothers expect to find their way back to their hotel using as markers the huge
Kawasaki and Epson neon signs that hover over the square in Tokyo. But the
signs are gone—the electricity has been turned off. Not speaking the language or
knowing the customs, two strangers in a very strange land, Gustav and Uwe
begin their unlikely blundering toward enlightenment, Gustav covering his
mounting frustration and fear by glibly reading from a small book of Zen sayings
while Uwe glowers into his digital camcorder at their ever-growing predicament.
After a series of mounting misadventures—stealing food, begging, becoming
homeless and losing one another—the hapless pair finally reach the (real-life)
monastery at Monzen.
The ancient, silent but vibrant space of the monastery is at first a great relief
after frenetic Tokyo, where everyone seemed busy talking on mobile phones and
no one was listening. But the discipline and demands of the Zen approach to
enlightenment—rising before dawn, bathing in cold water, doing zazen for
hours, then endless sweeping and polishing with hamstrings and shoulders
aching, their monkey minds going into overdrive—slowly peels away all
expectations until each finds himself face to face with his real demons… all
captured faithfully on Uwe's camcorder.
In the end, enlightenment turns out to be inseparable from the experience of
reality itself – harsh, funny, ordinary, and always wonderfully unexpected - and
through the middle of just what is happening, grace of a very human kind begins
to emerge and shine. Doris Dorrie captures the spontaneity of its emergence in
an artless and deeply humorous way, creating an effortlessly endearing minor
masterpiece from the old and never-ending human story of attempted spiritual
self-mastery.
Short versions of film description for brochure
The Buddha’s Forgotten Nuns (Australia, 2013)
A searching examination of some troubling questions: Is Buddhism a religious
movement based on equality? Or is it just as rooted in a strongly male-dominated
culture as are most, if not all, world religions? And has the recent and highlycontroversial ordination of six nuns in Australia begun to relax institutional
prejudice against female monastics?
Cave in the Snow (Australia, 2002)
The internationally well-known Buddhist nun Tenzin Palmo undertook her epic
12 months of meditation in a high Himalayan cave driven by despair at the
blatant sexism of her order. But she came out of it not only greatly deepened in
her practice, but utterly determined to overcome the many prejudicial obstacles
placed in the path of women in Tibetan Buddhism.
Tender (Australia, 2013)
In the seaside steel town of Port Kembla, members of a small community centre
become galvanized and transformed by a project to challenge taboo and care for
their own dead, creating a community-based funeral process. A beautifully
funny, visually striking and deeply moving celebration of community spirit, feisty
and tender in the face of death itself.
Au hasard Balthazar (France, 1966)
Described as ‘a heartbreaking prayer of a film’, made by ‘one of the saints of the
cinema’, ‘By chance, Balthazar’ follows the life of a humble village donkey from
birth to death as a way to meditate upon human and animal love, cruelty,
suffering, forbearance and grace, in a mysteriously powerful masterwork of
cinema that exacts from us a very particular kind of empathy.
Enlightenment Guaranteed (Germany/Japan, 2002)
Two likeable but hapless middle-aged German brothers travel to a Japanese Zen
monastery seeking enlightenment - or at the very least something to do when
their lives start to fall apart. In this endearingly wise comedy, ‘enlightenment’
turns out to be inseparable from the direct experience of reality itself – harsh,
funny, shocking, ordinary - and shining with an unavoidable humanity.