Soothing Screenings

Comments (0) By Gregg Rickman Wednesday, Feb 6 2008

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There's no false piety in "Projecting Buddha," a film series celebrating Buddhist cinema — and not a lot of dry piety, either. One highlight is a 2000 episode of the animated series King of the Hill, which parodies Kundun, Martin Scorsese's respectful biopic of the Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama. In it, Hank's son, Bobby, grabs a holy relic and is suspected of being a reincarnated lama. The Dalai Lama himself is represented by a documentary on his life, Compassion in Exile, and in another doc on the making of the Scorsese film, In Search of Kundun. By and large, these films present a lovely, pacifist acceptance of life. A documentary on the Vietnam-born Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step, shows us pretty cloudscapes, rice fields, and the c alming presence of the monk. It quickly skips over his membership in the group of monks who set themselves ablaze to protest the Diem regime in the early 1960s. Perhaps Meditate and Destroy, about Noah Levine, an author who employs his "punk-rock sensibility" to reach troubled youth, might be more confrontational. Today's screenings include Satya: A Prayer for the Enemy and Chasing Buddha.
Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Starts: Feb. 14. Continues through March 6, 2008