Thursday, April 23, 2009

Movie Review: Stephen en Martine Batchelor; Gude & Verhoeven, dir; 2008

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Over on my henro blog this week I linked to a new Dutch film about the Shikoku pilgrimage produced by Holland's Boeddhistische Omroep Stichtung, otherwise known as the BOS, the Buddhist Broadcasting Foundation, which according to its website is "the first independent Buddhist Broadcasting Foundation in the west to produce and broadcast buddhist programs within a country’s Public Broadcasting System."




Established in 1999, the Foundation began broadcasting in 2001 and has a wonderful catalog of film and radio productions available for online viewing and listening. I ran into them again this week in a short film on perhaps my favorite contemporary Buddhist writer, Stephen Batchelor. In 30-minutes we follow Stephen and his wife Martine as they trundle through the quaint French village they call home, relating the stories of how they came to be monastics and how a Scottish Tibetan monk who left his order fell in love with a nun studying Zen in a Korean monastery. Stephen also briefly discusses a new book project slated to be released in the fall of 2009, a novelization of the life of the Buddha.

You can watch the film (in English with Dutch subtitles) on Batchelor's site, here, or at the BOS, here.

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1 comment:

  1. Interesting Doc. I have the same feelings on Tibetan Buddhism. Way to complicated.

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