Arts Listings
Moving Pictures: ‘Milarepa’ Screening Benefits Tibetan Charities
Milarepa, a new film by Tibetan lama and actor/director Netken Chokling, will show at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 30 at Wheeler Hall Auditorium on the UC campus.
The screening is sponsored by the Center for Buddhist Studies and is presented in association with the Mill Valley Film Festival.
Milarepa premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, after which Chokling set out to distribute the film himself. The first-time director is taking his film around the country in a series of benefit screenings.
The story concerns the formative years in the life of one of Tibet’s most revered saints. Milarepa came from wealth, but when his father died, Milarepa and his mother were left in the care of in-laws who stole their money and treated them like peasant slaves.
When his mother urges him to exact revenge by studying sorcery, Milarepa journeys to the home of a great master and becomes his student. Eventually he returns to the village of his in-laws and uses his powers to stir up a storm to destroy it. But revenge proves hollow, and the film concludes with Milarepa’s realization that vengeance and destruction are futile. Part two, due in 2009, will pick up the story from here.
Tickets are $15, with all proceeds benefiting the Conservancy of Tibetan Art and Culture and Orphan Project. For more information, see www.milarepamovie.com.
